In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to write about my favorite cinematic dad. The problem with picking a favorite or “the best” is that it’s always tough to narrow the choice down to one. So let me acknowledge the other dads that made my short list: Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Christopher Walken in At Close Range, Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride, Choi Min Sik in Oldboy and Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. All great performances and all great films worth checking out if you haven’t seen them.

But if I have to pick one and only one favorite father, it has to be the late, great Charles Chaplin in The Kid.

Released in 1921, The Kid was Chaplin’s first feature-length film. At the time, most comedies were shorts mostly consisting of gags with the barest of stories holding them together so many in Hollywood thought Chaplin was crazy to even attempt to make a feature-length comedy. However, the movie turned out to be a huge hit—both at the box office and with the critics–and paved the way for even more ambitious films like Modern Times and City Lights.

In The Kid, Chaplin once again plays his iconic tramp character. He comes across an abandoned baby and raises the boy as his own (the “kid” was played by Jackie Coogan, Hollywood’s first child star who would grow up to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series) until forces threaten to tear the two apart.

Chaplin’s often been accused of being too sentimental in his work and you can certainly see his directorial hand here tugging at the audience’s heartstrings, but everything about the film works brilliantly. Yes, it’s a very funny comedy, but it’s also a touching story about a single father and his adopted son.

Much credit for the movie’s success must be given to Coogan and his charming performance. He was the quintessential kid actor—cute, natural and it certainly didn’t hurt that he could cry on a dime (Chaplin called him the only genius he had ever worked with). But I suspect a big part of it was also how personal this film must have been for Chaplin. Shortly before starting to work on The Kid, Chaplin’s first son Norman was born only to die three days later. The story of a loner who receives an unexpected chance at fatherhood and comes to realize he’ll do anything to protect his “son” must have hit close to home.

So to honor this film, marketed as “a picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear,” on this Father’s Day—here’s a clip of The Kid’s most famous scene, and one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema. Government officials have come to take the kid away from the Tramp. But Chaplin isn’t going to let him go without a fight. Happy Father’s Day!