City Lights (1931)

I've been doing some serious homework lately on the silent era, watching and reading as much as I can find; and above all that I've learned, there's one thing that really surprised me. I'd always seen the three great slapstick comedians as being contemporaries, but now I realise that they weren't. Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd both made their debuts in 1917 and didn't do anything meaningful until the twenties had come around. By 1920, Charlie Chaplin had already done everything.

His start in the industry came at Mack Sennett's Keystone studio, where he made no less than 35 films in 1914, including Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first feature length comedy ever made in the United States. A year later he had moved to Essanay where he became the world's highest paid movie star, already one of the most recognisable people in the world courtesy of his Little Tramp persona. By 1916 he had moved again, to Mutual where he pocketed no less than a million dollars in the process and gained complete control over his films. He didn't just star in them, he also wrote, produced and directed them himself. He started his own production company, built his own studio and in 1919 co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr and D W Griffith so that they would not just have artistic control but financial control too.

That six year or so difference between Chaplin and the other legends of the era might sound like a short period, but he made the most of it and redefined comedy in the process. Watching those early Keystones now can be almost painful. I remember slapstick comedy as being all about outrageous stunts, frequent pratfalls and incredible timing, but these Keystone films seem to be all about people with outrageous moustaches literally kicking each other's ass, and throwing bricks at one another.

Worse still, the debut of Chaplin's Little Tramp came in what must be one of the least funny films I've ever seen. In possibly the slightest plot of any film ever made, all Chaplin does in 1914's Kid Auto Races at Venice is to continually walk in front of a camera that's filming a road race. It's not funny in the slightest, merely annoying, and it's more than a little embarrassing to find a comic genius like Chaplin seem notably less funny than someone like Adam Sandler or Ashton Kutcher. Then again, audiences at the time were rolling in the aisles, and Chaplin continued to reinvent film comedy, introducing plots, feature lengths, drama and all sorts of other previously unheard of concepts. To go from Kid Auto Races at Venice to The Kid in only seven years is an incredible achievement, and all the credit is due to Charlie Chaplin.

City Lights didn't just come along at the very end of the silent era, it was the end of the silent era as far as Hollywood was concerned. In fact it had overshot the death of the silents by a number of years. The Jazz Singer had brought in sound in 1927 and everyone frantically followed suit, meaning that for all intents and purposes everything was sound by 1929. Yet here's City Lights two further years after that in 1931. Admittedly it has synchronised sound and various sound effects, but there is no speech. In fact the film opens with a few dignitaries dedicating a new memorial, upon which Chaplin's tramp is sleeping, and their voices are replaced by sound effects.

Partly this is because it took over three years to make with 190 days of actual shooting. Surely though the biggest reason has to be that Chaplin knew exactly what he was doing with silent film and didn't want to even attempt to translate his Little Tramp, a worldwide silent icon, into the sound era. After all when he came back to the Tramp again in 1936 for Modern Times he was still resisting the switch to sound resulting in what silent film afficionados call a 'mute sound film'. Sound to Chaplin at this point merely meant that he got to compose the musical score, along with starring, directing, producing, editing, co-writing and being totally in control of every aspect of the movie both in front of and behind the camera. As a result City Lights is possibly the most accomplished American silent film of them all, being the end result of eighteen years of Chaplin experimenting with film, stretching the boundaries of the genre and learning what worked and what didn't.

One of those innovations he brought in to silent comedy was drama. Just as with The Kid, City Lights will make you laugh but it'll make you cry too. The story is a comedy of errors. Chaplin is the Little Tramp once more, but the people he interacts with don't know that, including two very important ones. Early in the film he encounters a beautiful flower seller with a magnificently melancholy face, but she also happens to be blind. Due to a car door slamming at the opportune moment, she believes him to be a rich man. Later he saves the life of a millionaire who is trying to commit suicide, but this man is powerfully drunk and ends up with no memory of any of it.

When one day the flower girl doesn't appear at her corner, the Tramp investigates and discovers that she is ill and the forced lack of income is putting her behind on her rent. As he is smitten with her, he finds work doing odd jobs as a prize fighter or a street cleaner to raise money for her. Eventually he encounters the millionaire once more who flat out gives him the money. Of course when he sobers up he remembers nothing at all and so while the flower girl gets her surgery, the Tramp gets jail time.

What a difference from Kid Auto Races at Venice! Rather than having nothing at all, this film has everything. At points it is hilarious, including all the various slapstick sequences which are filmed with such incredible timing that they leave us astounded at Chaplin's sheer talent. Over seventy years on I found myself laughing out loud at his antics. It's not surprising that someone as talented as Johnny Depp could famously say that we're still stealing from Chaplin today.

But while it's such a funny film, it's also such a sad film. The scene after the Tramp is released from jail and comes across the girl working in an upscale flower shop is just heartbreaking. He has gone through such hardship for her, served time for her and she owes him her sight, yet she doesn't even recognise him. I won't spoil the magnificent ending but it brings more emotion in five or ten minutes than the Encore Love Channel can provide in a month. Suffice it to say that the noted critic James Agee said that it was "the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies".

And of course everything works together because Chaplin had so much control and lived up to the task. His direction is smooth, his music apt and his script spot on. It's the greatest one man performance in history. It's well known that the people who worked with him believed that if it could be done he would have played every role in every one of his movies himself. Of course he was forced to hire some actors, but even those he chose to play the parts he couldn't were deliberately picked for their ability to follow his direction. Rather than hiring an established actress to play the flower girl he cast a twenty year old socialite, Virginia Cherrill, who really wasn't an actress at all. They didn't get on but she did exactly what he asked her and it worked.

In fact everything works. I personally believe The Kid to be Chaplin's most thoroughly enjoyable film, but it's a very different movie to this one. This is his masterpiece, the perfect culmination to eighteen years of silent comedy from which he drew every bit of genius he had. When a talent as vast as Orson Welles can claim it as his favourite film of all time, it's time to start listening.

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