Summary
The Tramp takes the baby around a corner and into his apartment, where some women ask about the baby and its name. He is tongue-tied, before telling them the baby's name is John. Inside, he gets the baby settled in his apartment.
Meanwhile, we see the baby's mother looking for the car in which she left her child. She looks concerned, apparently having second thoughts about leaving her child all alone. When the driver of the car comes out of the nearby mansion, she runs to the front door and rings the bell, asking after the car that was there. She panics and faints as the mistress of the house comes out of the house.
Back at his apartment, The Tramp has set up a hammock for the child with a teakettle filled with milk hanging nearby. Nearby, The Tramp cuts and folds fabric to use to swaddle the baby. After he makes silly faces at the baby, he cuts some of the netting out of the seat of a chair and positions the chair over a bucket as a mechanism to potty train the child.
Five years later. We see the little boy, now older, sitting on a sidewalk as a cop walks up. He files his nails, then goes up to The Tramp's apartment. The Tramp gives him a quarter and tells him to put it in the gas meter, which the boy does. The Tramp then cleans the boy's neck with a handkerchief, before sending him out to "work the streets."
Working the streets entails the young boy throwing rocks through people's windows so that The Tramp can show up and charge them to fix the problem. After the boy runs from the scene of the crime, the homeowner comes out and The Tramp offers to help install a new window. The boy does another house and runs off, but before he goes to break a third window, he is apprehended by a cop, then runs away in the nick of time.
The cop finds The Tramp installing a new window, suspicious of the operation. As the homeowner comes out to pay The Tramp, the cop glares at him. When The Tramp rounds the corner and the boy finds him, the cop begins chasing them down the street.
A title card reads, "All's Well. Job Number 13." The Tramp installs another window and keeps finding himself in flirtatious situations with the woman of the house. They laugh happily, when suddenly the cop arrives there; it is his house. Suddenly, the cop appears at the window and grabs The Tramp's shoulder. For a moment, The Tramp thinks that it is the wife that is grabbing him, then strangling him, before he realizes that it is the cop, and flees.
Analysis
There is an innate humor embedded in the premise of the film, a tramp taking care of a motherless baby. An audience is unaccustomed to seeing a single man, let alone one who lives in squalor, take care of an infant, and the contrast between the absurdity of The Tramp's persona and his adoption of a maternal role in the baby's life creates a touching kind of humor. Before he has even attempted to care for the child, The Tramp is already a failure—he can never match the care and attention of a biological mother—yet he insists on trying anyway, even though he is bound to fail.
Indeed, the home that The Tramp creates for the child is charming in its ridiculousness and ingenuity. He nestles the child in a makeshift hammock that hangs from the ceiling and hangs a tea kettle with milk from a string, with which the baby can feed itself. What he cannot provide in terms of female maternal anatomy he simulates with strings and whacky inventions. In this sense, The Tramp creates his own maternal nest out of the items that are lying around his apartment.
Five years later, the orphan child and The Tramp have become a dynamic duo. The boy has turned into a miniature tramp himself, with a newsboy cap, a tattered sweater, and overalls, and they live in a hovel staging scams to make ends meet. The chemistry between Charlie Chaplin and his young costar Jackie Coogan is undeniable, and their performing compatibility gives the relationship a special charm. The viewer cannot help but be endeared to the pairing.
So much of the storytelling in any silent film, but especially a slapstick Chaplin film, is about the physicality of the performers. Chaplin can communicate so much psychological information about The Tramp—his shame, his pluck, his fear—with the slightest shift in physicality. A buckling knee or a double take, or even the simple pace of his gait, have the power to move the storytelling along, and this talent for physical performance is matched by Jackie Coogan. In this sense, the boy is not only The Tramp's protegé; Coogan is Chaplin's protegé as well, a younger double of the comedic master.
Every moment is packed with a new comedic conflict or irony. Moments after escaping the cop, The Tramp accidentally finds himself flirting with the cop's wife, whom he has just duped into paying him to replace a window. In this moment, The Tramp has come out on top—his scam worked and he is cuckolding his enemy the cop—yet it creates an even more dangerous situation out of which he must wriggle.
