Puss inBoots: One of the few surviving Laugh-O-Grams that Walt Disney and hislongtime associate Ub Iwerks animated in Kansas City. (1923, 30 mins,35mm, Print from David Shepard) In The Kid, hisfirst feature, Chaplin undercut the pathos of Victorian melodrama withthe purity of his narrative style; The Kid is indeed (as the titlespromise) "a picture with a smile and perhaps, a tear," but as a film itis spare and elegant, relying almost entirely on visuals and the strongscreen presence of Chaplin and his 5-year-old prot??Jackie Coogan.Edna Purviance, a desperate woman whose "only sin was motherhood,"abandons her fatherless infant to the streets, whence the shabbilydebonair Tramp takes the foundling and raises him as his own shabbilydebonair son. The love between these two castaways is palpable, yetChaplin establishes it entirely without the kind of mawkishsentimentality the situation invites. The Tramp gently teaches The Kidmanners at the dinner table, street smarts amid the rubble of the slum,and even when thedread Orphan Asylum authorities rear their puritanicalheads, tragedy gives way to practicality and the chase is on. In The KidChaplin looks over his shoulder at his own Dickensian childhood inLondon at the end of the Victorian era, when he and his older brotherSyd were no strangers to the cold arms of the children's protectionagencies, and nights spent begging in the streets.