Chaplin’s principal character, and one of the screen’s most famous icons, is the Tramp. In this Essanay short, the Tramp’s character is developed to encompass the pathos—as well as the comedy—for which Chaplin is celebrated. When a farmer’s pretty daughter (Purviance) is set upon by thieves, Charlie comes to her rescue, is given work on the farm, and dreams of making it his home.

Chaplin’s initial film for First National, A Dog’s Life pairs Charlie with Scraps—a dog he rescues from attack by other strays. Introducing an element of social satire that would henceforth be ever-present, the story follows the two outcasts as they search for food and befriend a down-on-her-luck dance hall girl (Purviance). Chaplin later commented that the film, his first three-reeler, was made when he “was beginning to think of comedy in a structural sense, [becoming] conscious of its architectural form.”

Of the eighty-six films produced in the five years before Evgenii Bauer’s untimely death in 1917, twenty-six are known; these are considered the major discovery of pre-Soviet cinema, notable for their distinctive eroticism and artistry, expressed in a variety of genres. Inverting the familiar schema of the male aggressor and female victim, Child of the Big City is a social melodrama whose protagonist, an orphaned seamstress, escapes the world of poverty only to become a monster of depravity and egotism, provoking the suicide of her idealistic suitor.