Simply Perfect

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Although the gag gets tedious, I found myself giggling quite a bit at this short, credited as the first appearance of Chaplin's Tramp. There is an auto race at the track, and a crowd is gathered, as are cameramen to document the event for the newsreels. A man become curious about the cameras and begins hamming it up for them. We see this even now when people make fools of themselves for the news cameras, so it is a timeless gag.Chaplin went on to be one of the most influential film makers of all time, a true genius on the screen and this is our first glimpse at the character the world came to love.

Kid Auto Races at Venice is disputably Charlie Chaplin's first film where he plays the tramp. And there sure was a lot of perfecting to be done. The film just consists of Chaplin walking around the filming of a car race at Venice, and getting in the way. Now this is all right for 1 or 2 jokes, but when you make it the entire movie, it gets old pretty fast. Because that's all there is to it. If I'm honest, the only reason to watch it is to see the tramp's origin. I suppose if you want to say you've see them all, that would be a warrant. So all in all, it's not one of Chaplin's best by any means. I can't really recommend it, unless you're curious.

As many reviewers noted, Chaplin's second film is historically important in so far as it is the first screen appearance of him dressed as the tramp. However, the film remains just that, a historical landmark. As a comedy, it is experimental in that it has a factual setting rather than a fictional one in a studio. The film has something to do with the tramp trying to get a picture of himself to send to his girlfriend, as the bookends of the film make clear. However, the film consists of nothing more than the tramp deliberately blocking the camera crew trying to film the kids' auto races at Venice. The director of the crew (and of the film) shoves the tramp back several times, so he can continue filming. The most amusing thing is that the tramp has his back to the autos turning the corner where filming occurs, so one wonders whether Chaplin received direction to get out of the way ahead of time or whether it was all ad-libbed like much of the other films of the period. As a Keystone comedy, it lacks panache. * of 4 stars.

If this hadn't been the Tramp's premiere, there'd be no sense in watching it. Very primitive comedy -- the whole film is a 7-minute shtick that consists of Chaplin standing in front of a cameraman who's trying to shoot an auto race. This is repeated for the length of the film.Like most of Chaplin's first one and two-reelers, the comedy is almost completely obscured by the crudity of the film technique. As in most of the 1914 films, it's sometimes almost impossible to make out what's happening on screen, the technical side of things is so elementary. But it IS the tramps first appearance, so it will always have that claim on our attention.