USA 87m Dir: Charlie Chaplin
City Lights was the very first silent film I ever watched and what an excellent place to start it proved to be.
The film sees Chaplin's Tramp character fall in love with a blind woman and make friends with a drunk millionaire. The fact the woman is blind means she doesn't judge him by appearances and the new friendship opens the possibility of being able to help her financially. However, with the Tramp's constant misfortune this is not going to be easy.
Though there is a decent enough story here, City Lights is essentially a series of linked sketches. Some of these are for little more than one joke like when the Tramp gets a job scooping up horse manure on the streets only to be alarmed when an elephant is led past. Others are far longer such as the Tramp in a boxing match. It has very little to do with the plot but is so much fun to watch. Chaplin's performance is a very physical one, even as silent film performances go. It's like a dance where everything is exceptionally well choreographed and Chaplin is the star.
The plot of the Tramp becoming friends with a drunk millionaire is an interesting one. It begins when the Tramp saves the millionaire from killing himself in a scene which deftly balances the dark nature of suicide with some brilliant physical comedy. From this point on the millionaire effectively becomes a second tramp, giving Chaplin someone to riff with in physical comedy. There's a paradox in their friendship- the Tramp needs the millionaire's friendship to help him go up in the world but it causes him a significant amount of trouble. The millionaire only recognises the Tramp at night when he's drunk so the Tramp leaves a double life of being the clumsy tramp in the day and mixing with high-society at night.
What surprised me most about the film was how much depth there is to it. Though there is lots of Chaplin being silly, there's genuine emotion in it from the suicide scene to the romance between the Tramp and the blind woman. I found myself really wanting a happy ending and instead got an ending that was open to interpretation. This is not just a slapstick comedy, it's something far more than that.
I'm in awe at what Chaplin did here. It's hard to describe just how fantastic he is in many of the scenes here, delivering long sections of physical comedy completely perfectly. This in itself would be something worth celebrating. But Chaplin also wrote the film, coming up with these ideas in the first place and working out how they would fit together in a story. He also directed it, being the one responsible for making sure such complicated scenes worked. As if that wasn't enough he even composed the fabulous soundtrack, something which brings the film to life even further. It might be called a silent comedy but actually the music is vital in making it work.
In many ways City Lights is old-fashioned but it's far funnier than the vast majority of modern comedies and is better written, directed and acted. Chaplin was a marvel and this is one of his greatest masterpieces.
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