My Favorite Movies: City Lights (1931)

Charlie Chaplin held onto the to the art of silent films long after everyone else had abandoned it. This was not out of pure stubbornness, but out of a firm belief that silent film was an artform unto itself. The acting, the writing and the filmmaking have a different set of values, a different texture, a different narrative flow. It was not a sound film wrought broken. It was just a different way to telling a story.

City Lights landed in the middle of the newly minted cacophony of “talkies” three years after The Jazz Singer made silent films entirely obsolete. And yet, no other filmmaker could have possibly made a silent film at that time except the most famous man on the entire planet. Chaplin was a legend in his own time, but it wasn’t a frivolous distinction.

Chaplin would win the battle, but Hollywood would win the war. He badly predicted the talking pictures would die out in the few years as a fad and, at the time, only got City Lights made because he financed it through his own studio. At Oscar time, that year, the voters shut the film out entirely, but he would win the audience. The film ended up being the best-selling film of 1931 and one of the only remembered films to be released that year.

City Lights tells a story so simply, so beautifully and so artfully, that one marvels at its lock-step thinking. Chaplin plays The Tramp who meets a poor blind flower girl plying her trade on the streets. Through a series of misinformation, she comes to mistake him for a wealthy man and he sets off to raise some money to help her get an operation that will restore her sight. The comic misadventures follow including a jail term, a prize fight and a hot and cold friendship with a drunken millionaire who only remembers The Tramp when he’s crocked then forgets when he sobers up.

Chaplin mixes comedy with pathos in the manner of a great composer. When things threaten to get too wacky, he pulls for an emotional beat, and when things get too soppy, he pulls back to the comedy. There is an ebb and flow to the comedy and the drama but they never step on one another.

All of this is the finely tuned craft that gets us to the conclusion, a beautifully-rendered tear jerker in which the girl (now healed) figures out that her beloved runaway millionaire is a penniless tramp. With a minimum of dialogue on the title cards, we get all that we need to know. “You can see now,” he tells her, and it becomes a phrase that has more than one meaning.