John Sturgis

We have Charlie Chaplin to thank for the blockbuster

  • From Spectator Life
Image: Shutterstock

The pandemic has hit the film industry for six – but there’s a precedent to suggest that it can come back stronger. Because that’s what Hollywood did after the devastation of the Spanish Flu a century ago. As that killer virus was still ravaging post-WWI America, a great auteur was at work on a project that would change everything. 

This week sees the centenary of the result – the first ever movie blockbuster. 21 January 1921, was the US release date of Charlie Chaplin’s first feature film, The Kid. Never mind the endless present-day stress about if and when anyone will ever get to see the 25th Bond film; it’s small beer compared to the significance of The Kid to the 1920s and their subsequent roaring. It’s almost impossible to conceive now what a global media event this movie was: the then biggest name in cinema spending an almost unheard of $250,000 on a staggeringly ambitious project that became an instant global smash. 

As Peter Ackroyd puts it in his biography Charlie Chaplin (2014): ‘It has been said that [The Kid] announced the coming of age of the cinema; film had become a world art form.’ I recognise that describing this as a blockbuster and a first may prove doubly contentious with film buffs. You could, you see, argue that DW Griffith got there first with the notorious Birth of A Nation (1915), running to an epic three hours, or with the London-set Broken Blossoms (1919). Feature-length films weren’t even invented by Griffith or Chaplin, having been made as early as an Australian stab at The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, since when they had been growing in sophistication, scope and star quality. John Barrymore played Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a year before The Kid, for example. But even though that 79 minutes of celluloid made Barrymore a household name, he didn’t begin it as one. 

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Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid, 1921 (Image: Shutterstock)

Once Chaplin had made The Kid, the new, longer form of film became not just immediately fashionable but a trend that never waned

What made The Kid uniquely important was that Chaplin, who not only wrote, directed, produced, and starred in it and, even later, wrote its score, was already a superstar when he shot it.

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Written by
John Sturgis

John Sturgis is a freelance journalist who has worked across Fleet Street for almost 30 years as both reporter and news editor

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