The Kid with Maud Nelissen at the Bonn International Silent Film Festival 2025

THE KID has a plot, and some of its incidents are so serious that Chaplin himself was a little doubtful about the success of the picture. In fact, he showed it before an audience of women in Salt Lake City just to try it out, and the women cried harder than they laughed – which was puzzling to a comedian. The plot concerns a little boy who is one of the world’s unfortunates – born in a charity hospital and a social outcast from his birth. […] The delicious humor and whimsical pathos of the scenes between Chaplin and Jack Coogan, who plays the boy, would do credit to Barrie. The fun is knock-about enough to catch the loud ha-ha of the vacant mind, but it is also fantastic, imaginative, and unreal. And in such a blending of qualities lies the artistic future of Chaplin. His comedy is simple enough to tickle the five-year-old Jackies in the audience, but it is also subtle enough to make the intellectual pause and connect it with the classic humor of the English stage and English literature. Even in his early days, Chaplin surpassed his rivals in technique. In THE KID he proves that he is a humanitarian; that is, a man of deep sympathies and definite social purpose. Agnes Smith, Picture-Play Magazine, No. 2, April 1921

Performances dates

• 09 Aug 25 The Kid with Maud Nelisse... at Bonn 🇩🇪 show