City Lights (1931) - film review

One evening, a good natured tramp talks a depressed millionaire out of killing himself and, in his gratitude, the millionaire declares that they will be friends for life.  The tramp asks merely for some money so that he can buy flowers from a poor blind girl he met earlier.   When he learns that the girl and her grandmother face eviction from their modest apartment, the tramp sets out to earn money to pay their rent arrears.  Having lost his job as a street cleaner, the tramp decides to try his luck in the boxing ring...

City Lights marks the absolute high point of the silent phase of Charlie Chaplin’s filmmaking career, but it was made just as silent films were fast becoming obsolete, consigned to history by the public’s burgeoning enthusiasm for that new phenomenon, the talking picture.  When Chaplin began work on the film in 1928, audiences had already had their first taste of sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer (1927), so it must have been tempting for Chaplin to follow suit.  However, Chaplin was so wedded to the  silent film that he resisted with an almost King Canute-like tenacity.  It would be another decade before he would make a conventional sound film, The Great Dictator (1940). 

When City Light was released in 1931, sound had virtually taken over from silent cinema, and no one was more surprised than Chaplin when film proved to be a huge commercial success, loved by critics and audiences alike.  The film offered a much-needed diversion from the woes of the Great Depression.

Although City Lights has no intelligible spoken dialogue, it does have a synchronised soundtrack which comprises a score (composed by Chaplin) and sound effects (for some very effective aural jokes).

Chaplin is renowned for his perfectionist approach to filmmaking, and nowhere is this more apparent than on City Lights.  The film took two years and eight months to make, the longest period that Chaplin spent on a single film.  One scene, the one where the tramp meets the blind flower girl for the first time, is reputed to have taken three months to shoot.  The ease with which the film flows and the effortless elegance in Chaplin’s performance both belie the extraordinary time and effort which went in to making the film.     

Chaplin’s co-star on City Lights was Virginia Cherrill, a twenty-year-old socialite with no prior acting experience.  Although Cherrill gives an effective, even highly engaging performance, she had an extremely bad working relationship with Chaplin.  At one point, Chapin became so annoyed with Cherrill’s apparent lack of interest in the film that he dismissed her.  He intended to replace her with Georgia Hale, who had featured in his earlier film The Gold Rush (1925).  When he realised the cost of having to re-shoot Cherrill’s scenes would be prohibitive, Chaplin had no choice but to reinstate his original leading lady.

City Lights is replete with the kind of visual gags that had earned Chaplin his reputation as cinema’s greatest clown and which are still highly amusing today.  It also features some of his most inspired set-pieces, including the hilarious boxing ring scene, which is a reworking of a similar sequence from an earlier Chaplin film, The Champion (1915).  Chaplin wasn’t just a first class comedian; he also had a natural talent for pathos, as is apparent in the very last scene in this film.  The final shot is the most poignant of any Chaplin film, and also one of the great moments in cinema history.  City Lights is a film that will make you laugh and then make you cry.  This is Chaplin at his best.

© James Travers 2009

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