Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'Kid Auto Races at Venice', his directing debut and the short that introduced us to the iconic character The Tramp. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is a long way from a career high, but does have historical significance for obvious reasons. 'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and a good deal of other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. For someone who was new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is not bad at all. While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick. The Tramp did become more likeable later but again he was still evolving. Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short. Overall, far from one of Chaplin's best but pretty good. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Cinema was in its relative infancy when an English immigrant to the United States donned a bowler hat, fake moustache and notched cane, and gave the world one of the most famous characters. Charlie Chaplin had debuted in a movie called "Making a Living" (as a non-Tramp character) and had filmed a movie before "Kid Auto Races at Venice", but this was the first released movie in which audiences saw the bumbling but kindhearted man in the ill-fitting clothes.Because cinema was a new phenomenon, movies didn't yet have complex plots, and there was no sound, no color, and no star system. It wasn't until a few months after the release that Chaplin directed his first movie, and so one might interpret the Tramp's interfering with the filming of the races as Chaplin's trying to figure out the path that he wanted to take in movies. Well, we should be glad that he took the path that he did, because he gave us some of the greatest movies ever. Most importantly, anyone who likes to learn about cinema history should definitely watch "Kid Auto Races at Venice".Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter Oona co-starred on "Game of Thrones". I wonder how "Game of Thrones" would be if the Little Tramp were a character.

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

The Kid at the Auto Races at Venice (1914) is basically a short about an auto race and an early debut of Chaplin's alter ego "The Tramp".Minor spoilers....A cameraman is trying to document an auto race on film, that is until an unwelcome spectator decides to mug in front of the camera. Strange short subject comedy from Charles Chaplin and sadly how people act whenever there's a camera around. A bit amusing.An interesting short. Worth watching.B+