City Lights (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home relatively early during The Brokenwood Mysteries and I switched to Turner Classic Movies for Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights. Most of the literature on this movie has centered around Chaplin’s desire to ignore the talkie revolution and go ahead and make a silent film in the face of their virtual disappearance, especially in the U.S. (In other countries silent films lingered quite a bit longer than they did here; the Soviet Union didn’t make their first sound film, Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life, until 1931, and Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu clung to silent filmmaking until 1935.) In fact, however, City Lights isn’t a silent film but a “sound film” in Sergei Eisenstein’s definition: one that would contain no dialogue but would use a closely synchronized soundtrack of music and sound effects to add to its dramatic impact and emotional appeal. There are a number of gags in City Lights, notably one in which Chaplin’s “Tramp” character swallows a whistle at a fancy party being given in his honor and disrupts an inane vocal performance (which is represented by a “singer” silently miming a song), that either wouldn’t have worked at all in a totally silent film or would have been incredibly chancy if Chaplin had had to rely on a live accompanist doing the effects. City Lights was begun in 1928 and finished in 1931 – “I had worked myself up into a neurotic state of wanting perfection,” Chaplin later wrote in his 1965 autobiography – and it came about as the result of an obsession Chaplin had: whatever his next film was going to be, it would feature a blind heroine. In fact, the film opens with a title card describing it as “a comedy-romance in pantomime” – which seems to me to be Chaplin effectively giving the finger to the rest of the filmmaking world that had embraced dialogue and forfeited what he considered the true art of silent pictures.

According to his early (1947) biographer Theodore Huff, after The Circus (1928) Chaplin had briefly considered making a movie about either Napoleon or Jesus Christ, but luckily his image of the blind heroine superseded those ideas. The story he evolved is one in which the Chaplin “tramp” is introduced in an hilarious scene (parodying the talkies in the use of squawking horns to represent two speakers at a big, pretentious ceremony, an effect later used in the televised Peanuts cartoons) in which he’s found sleeping in the lap of one of three statues representing “Peace and Prosperity.” Chaplin gets his jacket caught in the sword held by one of the statues and the crowd roars with laughter as he tries to extricate himself (an interesting carry-over from The Circus, in which he played a performer who can make audiences laugh only when he’s not consciously trying to). Then there’s a sequence involving a street elevator in which Chaplin dangles precariously on the edge of a manhole, but he does not fall in – indeed, there’s a pattern throughout this movie of Chaplin carefully setting up big pratfalls and then not going through with them, as if he were thinking, “I won’t get laughs that easily. I’ll work myself harder for them.” Chaplin’s character is living a precarious existence on the streets until he comes upon an eccentric millionaire (Harry Myers) who’s so despondent about his wife having left him that he’s planning to commit suicide – only Chaplin’s do-gooder instincts are roused by the hapless super-rich guy and Chaplin determines to rescue him. There follows a long scene in which the two alternately fall into the ice-cold water (too ice-cold for the actor Chaplin originally cast in the role, Henry Clive, who demanded that the on-set water be warmed; Chaplin fired him instead) and rescue each other before they return home to the millionaire’s palatial inner-city mansion and then drive out again in his Rolls-Royce. Only when the millionaire wakes up sober, he has no idea who Chaplin is or why this scruffy street person claims to be his friend.

Chaplin introduces the heroine, a blind young flower seller (Virginia Cherrill), on a streetcorner peddling violets (the old song “La Violetera” was Chaplin’s inspiration for this character and he used it in his musical score, which he composed once he realized the film was going to have to have a soundtrack of some sort to be releasable). She lives in a scruffy old apartment with her grandmother (Florence Lee) and thinks Chaplin is a millionaire. The story’s real millionaire gets drunk again and embraces Chaplin as a friend once more – the story features quite a few alternations between the drunk millionaire befriending “The Tramp” and the sober one rejecting him – including one scene in which the two men have returned to the millionaire’s home. Chaplin tells him that the flower girl and her grandmother are about to be evicted because they owe $22 in rent, and the millionaire offers him $1,000 not only to pay the girl’s immediate rent debt but to cover the cost of the super-operation she needs to be able to see again. Unfortunately, that night two burglars have broken into the millionaire’s home intending to rob him, and ultimately they get away but not before one of them blackjacks the millionaire, restoring his sobriety and making him once again ignorant of Chaplin’s existence. The police accordingly arrest Chaplin for the crime, and in a marvelously economical sequence we’re given a montage of calendar pages for the month of January 1930 and then a title card reading “Autumn” so we know Chaplin has served a nine-month sentence. Fortunately, before he was arrested he was able to pass the money the millionaire had given him while drunk to the flower girl, who used it to have the operation and to open a flower stand so she could still sell flowers, but in a more formal and economically sustainable way than she did before. In a famous final scene, Chaplin deliberately delays as long as possible the revelation that, far from being a millionaire, he’s really as broke as she is (more so, really, because he’s once again a tramp while she’s moved up at least a bit in the world). He even brings in a young, handsome customer for her that she briefly thinks is her benefactor.

Along the way there have been some excellent gag sequences, including one in which Chaplin gets a job as a street sweeper – and then loses it again because he comes back to work late to visit Virginia – and another in which he agrees to take part in a boxing match. He and the other fighter have arranged that they’ll split the $50 purse, but just before the fight starts the boxer he’s made the deal with receives a telegram reading, “Get out of town – the cops are after you.” Instead Chaplin has to fight an opponent who’s not only genuinely skilled but determined to win the bout and keep the $50 for himself. The scenes in the boxing ring recalled The Knockout, a marvelous movie Chaplin made for Mack Sennett in his first year in films, 1914 – though in that one Chaplin was the fight’s referee and, as I wrote about it in a moviemagg post about a night of seven Arbuckle shorts TCM showed one night, “Once Chaplin appears the film takes off and flies; he easily upstages both Arbuckle and the actor playing Flynn [the other fighter] with three minutes’ worth of relentless business, getting between the fighters, ducking under them as they’re in a clinch, playing up the whole homoeroticism of boxing as a sport and, quite frankly, throwing in our faces the difference between talent and genius.” And the scenes between Chaplin and Harry Myers as the eccentric millionaire also take us back to a collaboration between Chaplin and Arbuckle in 1914: The Rounders, a film Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in based on a music-hall sketch he’d done for Fred Karno in his native England, that seemed to me the ur-movie that set the template for Laurel and Hardy’s whole career.

I’ve blown hot and cold over City Lights through the years; I first saw it in a high-school screening in 1970 and enjoyed it, but over the years its obvious sentimentality wore me down and I decided I preferred Buster Keaton’s far more grim view of the world to Chaplin’s celebrated “pathos.” French film critic Raymond Durgnat identified this as the central problem with Chaplin’s work; he said that at one moment he wants us to laugh at him and the next moment he wants us to pity him because the heroine has left him. “We never pity Keaton,” Durgnat said, and for that reason he liked Keaton better – and I agreed. Then Chaplin’s films started to dribble out again as he prepared them for reissue in the 1970’s, and I got to see them all over again with fresh eyes. I still think Chaplin’s sentimentality was his biggest weakness as an artist (as it was for John Ford as well), and in City Lights he was definitely “pushing the envelope” by making the heroine blind. He also had a great deal of trouble with the actress playing her: Virginia Cherrill was known in Hollywood as a “party girl,” prone to late-night binges, and she often showed up for work looking the worse for wear after a long night “out.” She was also nearsighted, which paradoxically made it easier to play blind on screen (her performance in City Lights is one of the most effective ever given by an able-bodied actor playing a person with a disability). Chaplin recalled in his autobiography that the only direction he ever gave her was, “Look at me but don’t see me.”

After she finished the movie she signed with Fox Studios and got to make a movie with another one of the all-time Hollywood legends, though he wasn’t one yet and wouldn’t be for another eight years: the film was a college romance called Girls Demand Excitement and her co-star was the young, callow John Wayne. Cherrill then went on to make the surprisingly interesting musical Delicious, an underrated film with George Gershwin’s first original movie score, in which she played the spoiled-rich second lead to Janet Gaynor’s poor little undocumented immigrant from Scotland, fighting her over the man they both love, well-to-do playboy Charles Farrell. In 1934 Cherrill latched on to yet another legendary Hollywood leading man when she married Cary Grant – it was his first marriage but her second – and she retired from acting in 1936 (her last film was a British production called Troubled Waters with yet another co-star who went on to major stardom, James Mason). She ultimately settled in Britain with a well-to-do third husband, the Earl of Jersey, before they broke up and she went on to a fourth marriage to Florian Kazimierz Martini, whom she wed in 1948 and stayed with until her death in 1996. This time City Lights had me in its corner from the get-go – it helped that I was watching it with Charles and the laughter was infectious – and though I’ve previously called it Chaplin’s most overrated film (as I think its immediate predecessor in Chaplin’s canon, The Circus, is his most underrated), I’m now inclined to rate it considerably higher than I did then.