Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

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.

Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) ** (out of 4) This is a historically important film but it's not a very good one. For the first time we see Charles Chaplin in his Tramp outfit as he causes trouble at a race. There really aren't any laughs in the film but again, it remains interesting because we see Chaplin working out his routine.Even though the film isn't that good it's still historically important for Chaplin.Various public domain companies have released the film but for the best quality you should track down the Image release.

"Kids Auto Races At Venice" (1914, Lehrman) This film marks the second film Charlie acted in and the first time we would see the famous 'tramp' character. It's six minutes of Charlie at a racing cart/box/derby race thing walking onto the racing track and in front of the cameraman. He is constantly shoved or knocked out of the picture. It's neat that the film gives us the 'camera' eye as well as a couple of other points of view. So we get to see Charlie intentionally blocking the camera and getting manhandled for it repeatedly. Charlie is like a fly that won't shoo. But, alas, six minutes of one routine is a bit much. And yet, this film is as much a part of our film history as any other 'important' picture. It's 1914 dudes!!

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