Summary
The authorities from the orphanage insist that they must take The Kid, and try to take him away, but he calls out to The Tramp, who pushes the orphanage men away. The Kid trembles in fear before hitting the men with a large hammer. One of the men goes downstairs to fetch a police officer, who comes up and forces The Kid to leave. As the police officer and another man restrain The Tramp upstairs, The Kid wails in agony.
The Tramp manages to climb out the skylight onto the roof, running up the steep eves of the surrounding roofs pursued by the police officer. Meanwhile, The Kid is taken away to the orphanage in a truck. The Tramp climbs across various rooftops, eventually jumping into the back of the orphanage truck and pushing the man from the orphanage onto the street. Reunited with The Kid, The Tramp scares off the truck's driver and escorts The Kid down the street.
Back near The Tramp's apartment, The Woman appears and runs into the country doctor. He gives her the note that The Tramp showed him, the note that The Woman left all those years ago.
That night, The Tramp and The Kid go to a flophouse to hide out from the authorities. While The Kid waits outside, The Tramp goes through his pockets looking for change to pay for a night's stay, eventually finding one coin. When the man who runs the flophouse is looking away, The Tramp slides the window open and lets The Kid in. As The Tramp takes off his jacket, a sleeping man behind him appears to pick through his pockets looking for a coin to pawn.
The Tramp climbs into bed with The Kid, but The Kid insists on saying his prayers. Suddenly, the man who runs the flophouse wanders over, and The Kid hides under the bed just in time to escape his notice. When The Kid climbs under the blanket, the man finds him, and The Tramp must fork over another coin to account for the boy.
As they sleep, the flophouse proprietor sees an advertisement that offers a $1,000 dollar reward for the return of the five-year-old boy. When he realizes that they are sleeping at the flophouse, the proprietor goes over to inspect them, before picking up The Kid and carrying him to the police.
The Tramp rolls over moments later to realize that The Kid is missing. He runs out to find him, but does not know where to go. The next morning, The Woman goes to the police station and claims The Kid as her son. She embraces him, as the music swells.
The Tramp returns home, looking downtrodden and dejected. He sits on the stoop, unsure of what to do next, and falls asleep with his head leaning against the door. He dreams that the streets are filled with flowers and there is a joyous festival taking place. Around him are angels and devils dancing. One of the angels is the policeman. Suddenly, the door of The Tramp's apartment opens and The Kid, dressed as an angel, comes out and wakes him with a feather. They look around at the festival taking place, as a winged angel dog flies by.
The Kid invites The Tramp to put on an angel costume and go flying with him. They fly down the street, when a title card reads, "Sin creeps in." We see a group of devils creeping into the city past a sleeping angel. A devil approaches a woman angel and tells her to seduce The Tramp. She dances for The Tramp, and he follows her into a small room, where the brutish brother from the fight earlier, now dressed as an angel, beats him up. A fight breaks out with feathers flying everywhere. The policeman chases The Tramp, but The Tramp flies away. As he flies, the policeman shoots him and he falls to the ground. The Kid runs over to his body weeping.
The Tramp is awoken from his dream by the policeman, who takes him away to a mansion, where he is greeted by The Woman and The Kid, who jumps into his arms. The Woman invites him into the mansion.
Analysis
Even in the dramatic moments in which the authorities from the orphanage come to take away The Kid, Charlie Chaplin maintains his comically physical style of performance. The music crescendoes to sentimental heights as The Kid is taken away from his only friend in the world, The Tramp, and Chaplin animates his character with large expressions of alarm and continues to move his body with the rubbery elasticity of a clumsy acrobat. Even in moments of genuine distress, The Tramp is a comic archetype, a childlike clown who is unable to wield any serious force in the face of the oppressive forces of the state.
In this final section, the stakes of the narrative are raised when The Kid is taken away from his unlikely guardian, The Tramp. The viewer has grown more and more endeared to their unlikely domestic pairing, so the sight of their separation becomes a conflict that is almost more pressing than the separation of The Kid from his mother all those years ago. The Tramp has become a strange unlikely parental figure for The Kid, and the viewer is meant to know that a life in poverty with The Tramp is far better than the isolation of life at an orphanage.
Every scene in which The Tramp and The Kid appear turns into a physically ridiculous sequence. At the flophouse, they are somehow able to evade the notice of the man who runs the joint, with The Kid skillfully climbing in and out of small spaces, just barely eluding him by seconds. As The Tramp gets ready for bed, an apparently sleeping man in the next bed over begins picking his pockets without even opening his eyes to look. Chaplin uses every moment of the film to find an inventive way to create a new cat-and-mouse scenario with which to delight the viewer.
Once The Kid is handed over to the authorities, he is reunited with his long-lost mother, an undoubtedly positive outcome. The music that accompanies their reunion reflects the joy and beauty of the maternal bond, the joyous emotional homecoming. Even with this resolution, however, we know that The Kid is incomplete without the companionship of The Tramp, who raised him. Resolution will not be achieved until The Tramp is recognized and vindicated as an effective guardian of The Kid.
The film ends in a strange way, first with a dream that The Tramp has while sleeping up against his door. His tawdry street turns into a kind of afterlife, complete with angels and devils. This metaphysical world turns into the ambiguous backdrop for his psyche, in which morality is turned into flat archetypes of sin and goodness. We see the Tramp's simple conception of the world, as one of purity versus sin. Luckily enough, he is woken up by the policeman, who instead of punishing him brings him to the mansion to be reunited with The Kid. In spite of The Tramp's existential fears, he finds happiness and unity by the end of the film, pulled both out of poverty and back into parenthood.
