The Rag Man (1925)

Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Willard Mack and Robert E. Hopkins
Star: Jackie Coogan

The first entirely MGM outing for child star Jackie Coogan arrived four years after his huge appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and it borrows from it considerably.

For a start, he’s an orphan again, though he has a place in an orphanage this time out. The catch is that the orphanage is on fire when the film begins and so, rather cleverly, is the title card that tells us that.

He does climb out, using bedsheeets that are tied together but they’re also on fire and they drop him on the ground and wrap around him, so the firemen putting out the flames inadvertently bounce him out to the street, where a cop chases him away because he’s only dressed in a nightshirt.

And so he’s on the loose in New York City, a couple of years younger than Macaulay Culkin was when he made Home Alone II and without a packed wallet that will get him into the Plaza Hotel. Instead he sleeps his first night in the back of a rag man’s horsedrawn cart, in which he also finds a sweater, a pair of trousers and a familiar looking hat. He has to cut the trousers down to size by placing them on tram tracks, but that’s only the first of his bright ideas that works a treat.

He’s soon rumbled by Max Ginsberg, a junk dealer, who owns the cart and Dynamite, the horse that pulls it, and is quickly chased away. However Ginsberg drops his purse and the kid chases after him to give it back. He’s given a nickel for his honesty but he doesn’t want it.

He wants a job and, given how expressive he is in every movement, he gets one. He’ll watch Dynamite, he says. Instead he manoeuvres his way into becoming Max’s business partner, an accomplishment that isn’t remotely as wild as it sounds!

After all, this is the Lower East Side, a poor, working class neighbourhood of Manhattan, in 1925. Any work was seen as good work, so this ten year old kid driving a rag man’s cart on his own isn’t that wild. And he has to drive it solo because Max is plagued by rheumatism and is finding it increasingly difficult to get around.

Oh, and we eventually learn that his name is Timothy Patrick Aloysius Michael Kelly, about as Irish as it gets, and it doesn’t take very long at all for him to manifest the gift of the gab.

In fact, as odd as this might sound, having a ten year old orphan effectively take over a rag man’s business is probably the most believable aspect to this story. The rest relies on a set of outrageous plot conveniences that are layered onto each other until credulity is strained far beyond breaking point.

It could be argued, of course, that there are only two types of people in the world: the type who watch Jackie Coogan movies and call out how outrageously convenient the stories are and the type who watch the same movies and fall absolutely for his shtick, urging him on so that everything works out fine in the end.

I’m not blind, but I’m still the latter type.

So, stop me when you figure out how this is going to wrap up.

Max Ginsberg may be a poor junk dealer in 1925 but he ought to be rich. There are patents that should rightfully be his, something to do with raincoats. However, he can’t prove it and the lawyers, Bernard & Winkler, who handled all that, have vanished. Only Richard L. Scott, a thoroughly honest attorney, has any interest in helping Ginsberg out, but there’s not much he can do without evidence.

Is that enough? It should be.

If not, Kelly persuades Ginsberg to give him his last four dollars so that he can prove that he’s a businessman. He’ll take the cart out for a day and buy what he can and, if he does well, then they’re partners, Ginsberg & Kelly. Max is realistic enough to not expect his four dollars back but he’s hoping he’ll still have a cart and horse by the end of the day.

Now, young Timothy aims for the posh part of town, starting on 5th Avenue, to buy “high class junk”. Take a wild stab in the dark whose house he stops at first, leaving with some old clothes for fifteen cents. Luck is certainly with him—he doesn’t even get ticketed for parking in front of a fire hydrant—but it’s really with him. Not only does he stop at the house of Mr. Bernard, of Bernard & Winkler, but the clothes he buys come with a letter from Mr. Winkler— Henry Winkler, if you can believe it—who’s on death’s door, outlining his last earthly wish to return what they stole from the inventor.

Now, it doesn’t get used right away because the story has some emotionally charged twists and turns to work through before it does, but if you need more synopsis than that, then you really aren’t paying attention.

Jackie Coogan is fantastic here, though he’s not doing anything that he hadn’t done before in a better film. However, I’m not going to call him on replaying greatest hits in a new movie because a) they’re damn good hits, b) they still carry a punch and c) he was ten years old. Did he have any level of control over this? I doubt it, even with a notable credit at the beginning to say that the film “was made under personal supervision of Jack Coogan, Sr.”

Jackie Coogan at ten was as accomplished an emotional manipulator as any other adult star in Hollywood at the time. Even though we are in no doubt how this will eventually play out, it’s hard not to feel something when Timothy turns on the waterworks. He tried to help but it didn’t work out and so he’s going to go back to the orphanage and that’s all for Ginsberg & Kelly. He even tears the “& Kelly” part of that sign off the cart. It’s masterful stuff.

Max Davidson is pretty good as a namesake, Max Ginsberg, too. Much older than the star, of course, he’d started out in film in 1912 and starred in his own series of Izzy shorts in 1914. He knew his stuff, but he’s still not as smooth as Coogan and he’s appropriately left to play a foil rather than a lead. He gets some agreeable emotion into the scenes when Timothy tries to leave, but he’s always playing second fiddle.

Movies are often complex, highly subjective affairs, which is what gives critics a job to do. This, on the other hand, is pretty simple.

It’s a very easy film to like, because it would take a hard heart indeed not to fall for Jackie Coogan’s antics. He’s just that good.

It’s a very easy film to predict, because the key points are carefully telegraphed early and they play out almost exactly how we expect.

And, just in case you don’t like it and can’t predict it, it’s a very short film, so it’s over in no time flat, 68 minutes to be precise, and they zip past in a highly enjoyable blink.