If you know Charlie Chaplin and his famed cinema persona The Tramp only by reputation, as I did, then City Lights is the best introduction. It features in many lists of best movies overall, best comedies, and best of the silent era. All I knew: it’s the tale of The Tramp befriending and helping a penniless, blind flower girl (as they were called in the silent movie era). Enough to make me curious.
The categorization as a “silent movie” will puzzle you as the screen lights up. In front of a statue draped in white cloth, speakers are taking turns regaling their onlookers about the monument, a tribute to “Peace and Prosperity.” You hear voices, but they’re squeaky and intentionally unintelligible, emphasizing the speakers’ pompousness.
Some explanation: Chaplin’s reputation was forged in the era of silent movies. But by 1931, “talkies” had all but taken over. Chaplin, who was not only director and co-screenwriter, but also the chief composer of the music soundtrack, defied the trend with this “synchronized sound” offering. There are no voices and actually very few title cards. The story unfolds as dramatic acting, with a synchronized soundtrack that features a lively score punctuated by sound effects, such as the ringing of the timekeeper’s bell during a prize fight, timed perfectly to the action.
And the story that unfolds? It gets interesting when The Tramp tries to buy a flower from a young woman (Virginia Cherrill) who is being ignored by the fancy folks passing her by. He realizes she is blind, and you can see the sympathy in his animated face. He’s bewitched. She assumes he’s rich, mistaking the closing of a car door as his departure.
Later that evening, The Tramp saves a drunk (Harry Myers) from committing suicide along a river walkway, giving him a pep talk on the need to carry on. The man, humbled and excessively grateful, brings The Tramp home to, surprise, his mansion. Here begins a literal off-again, on-again, off-again relationship. When the millionaire is sober, he can’t remember The Tramp and has him cast out of his house. When he’s drunk, The Tramp is his best and only friend.
Throughout, nearly every scene is embellished with physical humor and sight gags: The Tramp trying to extricate himself from that statue and nearly impaling his most sensitive part on an outthrust sword; The Tramp trying to save the suicidal man, only to somehow find the noose looped around his own neck; The Tramp trying to eat spaghetti and slurping a party streamer instead; The Tramp in a boxing ring, a famous scene where he manages to avoid punches by hopping left and right behind the ref. And more and more. But with some patience you can see the story eventually coalesce as The Tramp pledges to help the blind girl avoid eviction and receive a newly discovered treatment that can restore her sight.
At first glance, City Lights feels an excuse for a never-ending series of sight gags. Taken individually, they’re clever and remarkable, but I for one found them more than occasionally frustrating distractions from the story I was interested in following.
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On second glance, City Lights holds together thematically. It wasn’t until the literal “morning after,” studying my notes, that the subtext of the story leaped out at me. Embedded in the hijinks is a knowing commentary on the difference between the haves and the have nots during the depths of the Great Depression.
Indeed, consider opening at that monument to “Peace and Prosperity.” As it’s unveiled, there’s The Tramp, a person at the very bottom of the economic pecking order, snoozing peacefully in the snow-white statue’s lap. Sure, the marvelous clowning as The Tramp climbs down goes on a bit long. But then you do see the movie has declared itself, contrasting the disparity between the rich and poor who live side by side among the city lights.
The drunkard millionaire only sees The Tramp for who he is, a concerned fellow human willing to risk his own life to save another, when he is the depths of self-pity. In the hard sunlight of sobriety among rich peers, he can’t lower himself to be seen with the Tramp.
The flower girl, at the very opposite end of the economic spectrum, can recognize The Tramp’s goodness whether she “sees” him as wealthy or destitute.
City Lights did not turn me into a Chaplin fan. I enjoyed the hijinks, and Chaplin’s athleticism and clever choreography were impressive. But whatever I feel for his accomplishment in City Lights rests with the knowing contrasts he portrays between rich and poor. He lays them out gently, like The Tramp himself, neither accusing nor condemning.
And if you like a good sniffle, the final, famous fade to black, which I’ll admit is among the best I’ve seen, will have you reaching for the hanky.