57. City Lights (1931)

Directed By Charlie Chaplin

Synopsis

The tramp meets a blind girl and falls in love with her. He also meets a millionaire who when drunk is very generous indeed, and when sober forgets all about his new best friend. Girl can be cured in Vienna by this doctor guy, the Tramp decides to make the money by sweeping streets and participating in boxing fights. That fails, and he gets money from the drunken millionaire. Gives money to blind girl, and gets arrested for theft. Back from jail, meets the girl who recognises him as her benefactor, who she thought was a millionaire.

Review

Ok, this was that rarest of things... a truly great Chaplin movie. As you have noticed I am not much of a Chaplin fan, I like Keaton much better for example and find Chaplin's films to be unecessarily sappy, while he doesn't have the same physical prowess as Keaton.

In this film, however, Chaplin achieves the "just right" mix between love story and comedy. The Tramp is a character that requires both Pathos and comedy to work, and usually Chaplin erred on one of the sides, or just made it clash. Here it melds perfectly. And we have to thank the acting for that, Chaplin is now a more experienced actor, and his leading lady, despite all the problems she created on set is equally unmarred by overacting.

This makes for believable characters, both when they are being funny or incredibly touching, as in the final scene. It is also a smarter film than the Gold Rush for example, Chaplin's jokes have many more layers to them than might at first seem aparent, like when dressed as a millionaire and driving his new car, the Tramp goes off in search of a fag-end (cigarrete butt for ye of the colonies), fighting another tramp for it. The scene in the restaurant with the spagghetti is equally intelligent in it's ballet-like intricacy, really worth watching. Buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

The accurate portrayal of a man looking at a porn mag stand:



Wikipedia:

Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles has been quoted as saying that this is his favorite movie of all time. In 1963, the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick what he felt were the top-ten films; he listed City Lights at number 5. In 1972, renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky was asked to list his 10 favorite films and placed "City Lights" at number 5 whilst expressing his admiration for the director, "Chaplin is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of a doubt. The films he left behind can never grow old." Celebrated Italian director, Federico Fellini, has often praised this film and his Nights of Cabiria makes quotations from it. In the 2003 documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen said it was Chaplin's best picture. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

French experimental musician and film critic Michel Chion has written an analysis of City Lights, published as Les Lumières de la ville. Slavoj Žižek also used the film as a primary example in one of his essays on Jacques Lacan, Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?