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City Lights (1931)
City Lights delivers all the Charlie Chaplin hallmarks: the duck walk, bowler hat, toothbrush ’stache and pratfalls as gymnastic high art.
What an audience 95 years after City Lights’ release might not expect is how profoundly bittersweet the silent film still is. Here, Chaplin’s most famous recurring character, the Tramp, falls for a blind flower vendor (Virginia Cherrill). She’s struggling to pay the rent, and the Tramp sees his unexpected new friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers) as a path toward keeping her off the streets.
City Lights’ two-year shoot began in the Gatsby era and ended amid the Depression. And even though the Tramp had appeared in short films as early as 1914, both his vagrancy and his determination to help, in spite of his circumstances, took on deeper meaning in City Lights as the 1930s darkly arrived.
Chaplin was cast as the underdog for making City Lights, too. The silent-era icon stuck to his guns through the early “talkies” (which debuted in 1927), defiantly releasing this late-stage silent classic under a title card reading “A comedy romance in pantomime.”
The result was a critical and commercial hit notable for both its mastery of tone and elegant scene construction. For every joyfully chaotic set piece—most notably the Tramp trying his cowardly hand at boxing—there’s a 60-second vignette present mostly for poignant little ironies. See: the Tramp driving his friend’s Rolls Royce down the block just to steal a sidewalk cigar butt from a fellow homeless man.
Even the happy ending has strings attached, as Chaplin shows himself to be as prodigious with hard-won sentiment as he is with a face-plant. Cinemagic, Aug. 23 and 25.
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