City Lights
|  Right as Charles Chaplin was beginning preparation on City Lights, his fifth feature film and the third to center on his iconic Little Tramp character, Hollywood cinema underwent a seismic shift with the arrival of synchronized sound. The industry had been toying with the technology for years; on August 6, 1926, Warner Brothers debuted Don Juan, their first synchronized sound film using the Vitaphonem sound-on-disc system, and The Jazz Singer, which featured instances of synchronized dialogue, took the world by storm in the fall of 1927. By 1928, with the release of Warners’ first “100% All Talking” film Lights of New York, it was clear that “talkies” were here to stay. Chaplin, who had been perfecting the art of comedic pantomime and raising it to new levels of artistry for the previous decade and a half, was understandably resistant to the technological shift, professing as late as 1931 that he would “give the talkies three years.” His art was a silent one—or at least one devoid of spoken dialogue—and he was determined to continue on, regardless of what the rest of the industry was doing.Thus, City Lights is, for all intents and purposes, a silent film in the sense that all dialogue is presented in intertitles and we never hear anyone speak. Well, that’s not entirely true, as Chaplin uses the film’s opening sequence in which a portly politician dedicates an elaborate new statute in the city square, to mock both the pomposity of public figures and the technical inadequacies of early sound by having him speak in tinny, nonsensical noise produced by a kazoo (the fact that the statue is meant to evoke “peace and prosperity” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression gives it an added jab of social satire, as well). Chaplin’s resistance to synchronized sound extended only to dialogue, as he employed a synchronized musical score, most of which he composed himself, and also deployed carefully chosen comical sound effects to underscore the action onscreen. One of those sound effects is the simple slamming of a car door, but it becomes a lynchpin of the plot and evidence of Chaplin’s brilliance in finding clever ways to employ the new cinematic technology. The car door being slammed is that of a limousine, which Chaplin’s tramp has crawled through during a traffic jam to avoid running into a police officer. Sitting on the sidewalk is a blind girl selling flowers, and she mistakes the connection between the limousine door closing and the tramp arriving as evidence that he is a man of great wealth. The tramp, ever the sentimental sort, falls immediately in love with her and becomes determined to help her out, especially when he learns that her eyesight can be restored by a medical procedure available only in Vienna. Being a tramp, he has no economic means, but that doesn’t keep him from trying to earn money in any way possible, including working as a street cleaner and later stepping into a boxing match despite having no pugilist skills. Interwoven throughout the plot involving the blind flower girl is a secondary, ultimately related plot involving the tramp’s inadvertent relationship with an eccentric millionaire (Harry Myers). The tramp saves the millionaire from drowning himself in a fit of drunken depression, and the millionaire is so thankful that he invites the tramp back to his house, dresses him in his finest tuxedo, and takes him out for a night on the town. The only problem is that, once the millionaire sobers up, he forgets who the tramp is and instructs his butler (Al Ernest Garcia) to throw him out. The millionaire reappears throughout the film, and whenever he is drunk (which is quite often), he remembers the tramp as his good friend and embraces him, an embrace that lasts only so long as his inebriation (in one of the funnier moments of reversal, the millionaire wakes up sober with the tramp happily snoozing next to him in his bed). For many, City Lights is Chaplin’s masterpiece, the fullest elaboration of his unique cinematic art, a position that is hard to argue with. Chaplin had been making feature-length films since The Kid in 1921, which along with The Gold Rush (1925) demonstrated his ability to extend his finely wrought mixture of comedy and pathos beyond two reels. City Lights is a particularly daring film in the way it shifts tonally, from broad slapstick, to nuanced social comedy, to unapologetic romantic drama. Chaplin’s scenes with Myers’ millionaire are among the funniest in his oeuvre, especially when they both show up smashed at a tony nightclub and proceed to infuriate everyone around them with their inebriated clumsiness (many a chair is pulled out from under people, the tramp accidentally sets a woman’s dress on fire, and he mistakes a elaborate dance routine for an instance of domestic abuse that he must stop). The film also opens with one of Chaplin’s greatest and most politically daring setpieces, as the dedication of the “peace and prosperity” statue, which features three Roman-like figures, is marred by the revelation of the tramp sleeping on the statue, after which he gets his pants stuck on one figure’s sword and manages to put his rear end in the face of the other two. While it wouldn’t be until Modern Times (1936) that Chaplin would make a fully political film, City Lights continues the running satire of power and wealth run amok that thread throughout his entire body of work, emphasized all the more by the film’s focus on two extremely marginalized characters (a tramp and a blind girl, both of whom are largely ignored by society). Chaplin’s perfectionism was already legendary at this point, and the anxiety he felt at making another silent film when the industry was shifting to sound and audiences were clear in their preference for spoken dialogue, only intensifies the difficulties of the film’s production, almost all of which took place at Chaplin’s studio. His working relationship with Virginia Cherrill was strained at best, and at one point he actually fired her, only to bring her back when he was unable to secure a suitable replacement. Stories abound of Chaplin doing take after take, particularly of the sequence in which the tramp first meets the blind girl and she hands him a flower. It allegedly took him more than 300 takes and two weeks of filming to work out the idea of her mistaking the tramp for a millionaire by having him come out of the car. Yet, the finished film betrays none of the troubles, anxieties, or difficulties of the production, and audiences embraced it with great enthusiasm (as critic Rose Pelswick wrote in the New York Evening Journal, “City Lights has no dialogue. And it’s just as well, because if the picture had had words, the laughs and applause of last evening’s audience would have drowned them out.” More than 80 years later, like all of Chaplin’s best films, City Lights maintains its humor, its charm, and its sentiment. The film’s final shot, a rare close-up of the tramp’s face after he and the flower girl, her sight now restored, cross paths once again, is rightly one of his most famous, embodying as it does the intense emotion that Chaplin worked into his comedies. As much as he sought to generate laughs, he also wanted to move his viewers, and City Lights, with its unblinking depiction of an otherwise ignored man at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder standing at the threshold of true happiness, is clearly meant to move the audience to tears, which it did. In some of its best moments, City Lights derives humor from the darkest of situations (particularly the scene in which the tramp saves the millionaire from drowning himself, but is almost drowned in the process), but the overall sense we leave with is one of deep affection and warmth, of possibilities for human connection in a world full of misery, heartbreak, and cruelty.
Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(4)
