Alicia I love this movie so much

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Maliejandra 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.

MisterWhiplash Tramp's first appearance and... he's a punk. Fun and meta at first, at least in the way that it's a movie about movie-making at a time when that was a fresh idea, but wears out its welcome as it's a one-note gag. There's not really any of Chaplin's great comically timed physical gags, it's just him being an a-hole getting in the way of a camera crew as they try to get footage of cars racing by. I wish there was more to it as Chaplin clearly already owns the role, but there's none of the charm or innocence yet. Guess these things would take time to alter, though unlike, say, Mickey Mouse's early appearances (comparing to iconic comic figures of the early 20th century), being an ass doesn't suit the Tramp so well, at least not to this extent (if maybe he'd just interacted with another character or built upon something that'd be one thing).

Film_Nitrate It's strangely appropriate that this should be the first intertitle of the first film to be released that featured Charlie Chaplins' immortal character: The Tramp. From his very first appearance, primitive though it is, he is undeniably engaging, though there is nothing in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. to suggest the character was endearing enough to be a long-term fixture, let along the icon he became. Considering Chaplin himself would go on to appear in a staggering 35 films over the next 12 months for Keystone, it seems it was just as impossible to keep him away from the camera. But this is the place it all started for The Little Tramp.A century has now passed since the Keystone comedies producer Mack Sennett decided to make a short film with director Henry Lehrman and new actor Charles Chaplin at the Kid Auto Races on Saturday January 10, 1914, and to watch the 6-minute film today is to look back onto a world completely alien to anyone alive today. Even the title is cumbersome and obscure. The Kid Auto Race, in this case the Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race, was a short-lived event where the streets were closed off in Venice and young teenage boys were encouraged to race each other in their own home-made carts, usually powered by motorcycle engines. The race was officially administered, and for the winner there was a considerable prize of $250 on offer. To see boys racing what are effectively motorcars around the roads, with no safety equipment whatsoever, only adds to the modern disconnection with the film. It's to this usual backdrop that Chaplin debuted his creation to a large audience for the first time.The most fascinating aspect of Kid Auto Races is the reaction of the audience to Chaplins' presence. Film cameras were still uncommon at the time, so there would have been a degree of excitement about appearing in a film (one woman apparently had no intention of being immortalised on nitrate, and visibly hides behind a programme for the duration of a scene with Chaplin right in front of her), but more than that we see their amusement and interest in the strange looking fellow jumping around in front of the camera. Mack Sennett had found the Tramp character hilarious when Chaplin first experimented with it on the Keystone lot, but looking around the many faces in the crowd, they are all smiling or laughing, even if they are slightly bemused. If this was an indication of how audiences might react when the character was shown in theatres across the country, then it was a positive one.The film is all improvised, with Chaplin and the "director" the only apparent actors. There's also the virtually unprecedented scenes in which the camera is filming another cameraman hand-cranking the camera on screen which Chaplin is larking around in front of – in one of the first examples of this happening. Despite this on-screen camera, Chaplin regularly breaks the fourth wall, and it's inconsistent throughout which camera is being addressed.As entertainment, even the most enthusiastic film historian would have a tough job making a case for Kid Auto Races aging well. The film is almost like an artists' original sketch for what would eventually become a magnificent painting. There are many better Chaplin shorts, and many better shorts featuring The Tramp. But as a historical document, showing the origins of this great character, this is absolutely invaluable and it's easy to imagine in another 100 years people watching this to see exactly how Charlie Chaplin debuted The Little Tramp.

Nazi_Fighter_David In 1914, Charlie Chaplin was an obscure British vaudeville actor touring America when he walked into the Keystone Studios in California… He then proceeded to crank out over 30 films in the following eleven months, sometimes making over two films a week, many of which he directed… It was during this time that he adopted his classic tramp character, a real landmark moment in film history… In his second film, "Kid Auto Races at Venice," he simply improvised in front of a crowd watching a kid auto race in Venice, California… Those in the crowd were completely unaware they were watching a superstar in the making and were probably just wondering who on Earth he was…In the haste to get the films out, negatives were destroyed, and maybe only twenty prints were made which were then duplicated -- those were then copied, and so on, so the films quickly got damaged… Movie theaters would often cut them down (with no real expertise) to save time, so whole scenes were lost… Some films even had different endings… What were left were dozens of different versions of the same film… They were even re-issued with new titles… Now, 91 years later, the British Film Institute, together with Cineteca in Bologna, Italy, have been scouring the world's archives and private collections for as many different versions as they could find and then painstaking reassembling a new master copy from all the different permutations, to bring them back as close as possible to the original version