City Lights Reviews

The story of a tramp in love with a blind flower girl, Charles Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS is one of the cinema's greatest and most durable masterpieces. Billed by Chaplin as "a comedy romance in pantomime," the film was a daring venture for its maker: a silent movie released months after Hollywood had converted totally to sound. A tramp (Charles Chaplin) buys a flower from a lovely blind street peddler (Virginia Cherrill) with his last piece of change. That night he encounters an inebriated millionaire (Harry Myers) in the act of doing away with himself. After the tramp talks him out of it, the grateful millionaire treats him to a night on the town. The next morning the tramp takes his blotto benefactor home. When his beloved flower girl walks by the millionaire's townhouse, the tramp hits him up for $10, which is used to purchase the girl's entire inventory. When the tramp returns to the townhouse, its owner, now cold sober, fails to recognize him. That afternoon the tramp again encounters his rich drinking partner, who, drunk again, immediately acknowledges and embraces him and takes him home to a wild party. The next morning the tramp is ejected from the premises by the millionaire's servants. Learning that the blind girl is sick with a fever, the tramp determines to help her and takes a job as a street cleaner. On his lunch hour he brings her food and reads her a newspaper story about a miraculous new cure for blindness. Discovering an eviction notice in her flat, he promises to return the next morning with the $22 she and her grandmother (Florence Lee) owe in rent. Returning to his job late, he is fired. That night, after failing to win a $50 purse in a prizefight, the tramp bumps into his on-again, off-again friend for the third time. The millionaire, drunk yet again, takes him to his townhouse and gives him $1,000 for the flower girl's rent. Lurking in the parlor are a pair of burglars, one of whom knocks the millionaire cold. The tramp routs the thieves and calls a cop, who searches him and finds the $1,000. When the millionaire comes to and again fails to recognize him, the tramp flees with the cash, which he relays to the girl to use for her rent and for an eye operation. Nabbed by the police, he serves a prison term for robbery. Autumn. The girl, cured of her blindness, is now ensconced with her grandmother in a fashionable flower shop, where she waits in vain for the presumably wealthy and noble young sponsor she has never seen to return to her. One day she interrupts her work to laugh at an abject hobo outside on the street. When the hobo spots her through the window, he is transfixed for a moment and then smiles shyly. She goes outside to give him a flower and a coin. When their hands touch, the girl realizes that this scruffy hobo is her benefactor. "You?" she says. The little tramp nods and asks her if she can see now. "Yes," she replies tearfully. "I can see." Chaplin did not entirely eschew sound in CITY LIGHTS; although there is no spoken dialogue in the film, there is a soundtrack. Chaplin's score--an evocative collection of Italianate melodies composed (or possibly adapted) to match the moods of the scenes they accompany: jaunty, bittersweet, sad, etc.--is punctuated at appropriate intervals by a rakish little 12-note trumpet tattoo. Complementing the score are synchronized sound effects which Chaplin applied both realistically and expressionistically. The realistic effects are reserved for the reproduction of only such significant noises as gunshots, police sirens, a boxing ring bell (in dramatic contrast to the distracting and annoyingly vulgar series of bops, tweets, and boings that were dubbed into Chaplin's two-reelers when they were reissued in the late '30s). The expressionistic sounds are used for satiric and farcical purposes: a pair of kazoo-voiced bigwigs orating gibberish at a public event, the tramp attracting unwanted taxis and dogs after swallowing a whistle and experiencing an attack of drunken hiccups. During shooting, Chaplin fired his radiantly beautiful leading lady Virginia Cherrill (Cary Grant's future first wife) for--rumor has it--showing up on the set bleary-eyed from the previous night's partying. He later reinstated her, perhaps figuring that bleary eyes are not totally inappropriate to a blind character. It was a wise decision. Cherrill is the most memorable female lead in the entire Chaplin oeuvre. Chaplin himself gives an unforgettable performance in the movie. His two drunk scenes are alone worth the price of admission (or rental). As has been noted elsewhere, no one has ever played a funnier drunk than Chaplin. He could feign lack of control with wondrous control and he had a knack of appearing to unfocus his eyes that was uncanny--at times you can almost see tiny comic-strip circles in front of them. Ultimately, however, it is not the comedy in CITY LIGHTS that people remember--although the picture's nightclub and prizefight sequences are among the funniest of Chaplin's career--but the pathos. Chaplin was once praised for introducing the element of pathos into his work but is now increasingly criticized for it--often as part of an attempt to compare him unfavorably with the less sentimental Buster Keaton. Overlooked--possibly because of the haunting power of Chaplin's more touching moments--is their infrequency; the ratio of laughs to tears elicited even by CITY LIGHTS, his most poignant film, is well over ten to one. And Chaplin had the good sense to consistently undercut the sadness in his scenarios with comedy--for example, the CITY LIGHTS scene in which the lovesick tramp receives a faceful of water unwittingly delivered by his blind beloved. One scene that is uncut with comedy is CITY LIGHT'S final one ("You?"), after which the emotionally devastated viewer is left with a deeply unsettling thought: not "what happens next?" but "I can't bear to think what happens next." In 1949 critic James Agee wrote: "It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies." Today, thousands of films later, there is no reason to revise and update Agee's assessment. Not as ambitious as THE GREAT DIRECTOR, as inventive as MODERN TIMES, nor as consistently funny as THE GOLD RUSH, CITY LIGHTS is nonetheless Chaplin's greatest movie. A sequence Chaplin shot for CITY LIGHTS but discarded before release can be seen in the documentary THE UNKNOWN CHAPLIN (1986). (Violence.)