Willie's reactions to the children plainly call to mind W.C. Fields--his peerless comedy short The Golf Specialist (1930) is worth seeing for the bit in which he tries to grab a little girl's piggy bank alone. Fields was cagey, and even repulsive, but at the same time a juggler, a mountebank, a Ziegfeld star, and always in more direct contact with his audience than a thespian like Thornton. But Thornton, a meatless soupbone stewing in the southwestern heat, is so good I didn't wish the movie had starred Fields (who would, however, die all over again of envy at the uncensored dialogue). Thornton brings such a distinctive style to such relentless material that I became greedy for it--I felt I could listen to him blurt obscenities at the most inappropriate moments forever.

At the same time, Willie is clearly in need of redemption and it's bound to come in the form of a child who reaches him through his haze. What keeps the movie on track is that the child, played by Brett Kelly, is also ironically unlikely for his part. In as much as he's a depressed fat kid who's picked on by the other kids and whose father is in prison, he's prime for a "heartwarming" surrogate father story. But he's also yucky in the way kids can be (the first time he sits on Willie's lap he sneezes chocolate ice cream onto his beard, which Willie never bothers to clean off) and pesky, asking Willie why he doesn't look like Santa.

The plot maneuvers Willie into holing up at the Kid's house (when Willie arrives there and the Kid says there's no one else at home, Willie's faster-than-thought response is to put on a ski mask and pull out a gun) and Willie does start responding to him, though in burnt-out character. And the movie manages to keep the Kid weird without trying too hard; he's believably unaware of his own strangeness in the way kids are because of gaps in their socialization and their lack of experience. There's pathos, of course, but it's so odd--the Kid giving Willie a blood-stained hand-carved wooden pickle for Christmas, for instance, or Willie repairing the Kid's Advent calendar that he ate his way through in a drunken stupor, putting candy corn and aspirin in where the missing chocolate was--that it doesn't disrupt your sense that this is a work of irony, that the real and the ideal are being kept in their respective corners.

I began thinking of Charlie Chaplin in his great, early days, most evident in the Mutual shorts of 1916-1917, in which he gloried in his freedom as an unassimilable outsider without worrying about whether his audience approved of him. This is when he embraced his standing as an ironic protagonist, and was truly heroic, a defiant archetype for the entire world. But by the time he made his sentimental feature The Kid (1921), in which the Tramp character raises an abandoned infant boy, he had gone soft, seeking sympathy as a protector of dogs, orphans, and later, most famously, the blind girl of City Lights (1931).