Charlie Chaplin was sitting atop the movie world in 1921 when he decided (against heavy studio resistance) to make THE KID, his first dramatic comedy -- a tale of an abandoned baby adopted by an impoverished tramp and the life they build together, it offers all of the slapstick humor of his earlier two-reel classics but placed them in a broader, more sentimental story-arc. The result was a revelation to audiences and an early hint of the direction of Chaplin's work of a decade later.
