City Lights


City Lights is a 1931 American synchronized sound romantic comedy-drama film written, produced, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind woman and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire.
Although talking pictures were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working without dialogue only incorporating sound with the use of a synchronized musical score with sound effects. Filming started in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. City Lights marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song "La Violetera" from Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.
City Lights was immediately successful upon release on March 7, 1931, with positive reviews and worldwide rentals of more than $4 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films of all time. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance believes "City Lights is not only Charles Chaplin's masterpiece; it is an act of defiance" as it premiered four years into the era of sound films which began with the premiere of The Jazz Singer. In 1949, the critic James Agee called the film's final scene "the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid". In 1991, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it 11th on its list of the best American films ever made.

Plot

The unveiling of a new monument to "Peace and Prosperity" reveals the Little Tramp asleep in the lap of one of the sculpted figures. He escapes the assembly's fury and roams the city.
The Tramp encounters a flower girl on a street corner. He is instantly smitten and realizes she is blind while buying a flower from her. The woman mistakes him for a wealthy man when the door of an automobile slams shut as he departs.
That evening, the Tramp saves a drunken millionaire from suicide. The millionaire takes the Tramp, his new best friend, back to his mansion for champagne, then to a party. After helping the millionaire home the next morning, he sees the flower girl en route to her street corner. He gets some money from the millionaire, buys all her flowers and drives her home in the millionaire's car. After the Tramp leaves, the flower girl tells her grandmother about her kind, wealthy friend. Meanwhile, the Tramp returns to the mansion, where the millionairenow soberdoes not remember him and throws him out. Later that day, the millionaire is once again intoxicated and, seeing the Tramp on the street, invites him home for a lavish party. However, the millionaire is sober again the next morning and again kicks the Tramp out.
Finding that the woman is not at her usual corner, the Tramp goes to her apartment and overhears a doctor telling the grandmother that she has a fever. Determined to help, the Tramp takes a job as a street sweeper. On his lunch break, he brings her groceries. To entertain her, he reads a newspaper aloud, including a story about a Viennese doctor's blindness cure. "Wonderful, then I'll be able to see you," says the woman. He also finds an eviction notice the woman's grandmother has hidden. As he leaves, he pledges to pay the rent. However, he is fired for frequently being late.
A boxer convinces him to fight in a fixed match and split the prize money. However, the boxer is replaced at the last minute by a no-nonsense fighter who knocks the Tramp out despite the Tramp's nimble evasions.
The Tramp encounters the drunken millionaire again and is invited to the mansion. He relates the flower girl's plight and receives money for her operation. Burglars knock the millionaire out and take the rest of his money. The police find the Tramp with the money given to him by the millionaire, who, because of the knock on the head, does not remember donating it. The Tramp evades the police long enough to give the money to the flower girl, telling her he will be going away for a time; he is arrested and imprisoned.
When the Tramp is released months later, he goes to the flower girl's customary street corner but does not find her. The womanher sight restorednow runs a flower shop with her grandmother. However, she still remembers the mysterious benefactor, whom she mistakes for a wealthy customer. The Tramp happens by the shop, where the woman is arranging flowers in the window. She watches him get taunted by newspaper boys. He stoops to pick up a discarded flower and turns to the shop's window. He suddenly sees the woman, who has been watching him. At the sight of her, he momentarily freezes, but then breaks into a broad smile. The woman giggles to her employee, "I've made a conquest!" She offers him a fresh flower and a coin. Embarrassed, the Tramp begins to shuffle away, but the woman again offers the flower, which the Tramp shyly accepts. She takes his hand and presses the coin into it, then abruptly stops. She runs her fingers along his arm and shoulder, then gasps, "You?" The Tramp nods and asks, "You can see now?" She replies, "Yes, I can see now", and presses his hand to her heart with a tearful smile. As the film fades, the Tramp smiles back.

Cast

Uncredited Cast

Pre-production

Chaplin's feature The Circus, released in 1928, was his last film before the motion picture industry embraced sound recording and brought the silent movie era to a close. As his own producer and distributor, Chaplin could still conceive City Lights as a silent film. Technically the film was a crossover, as its soundtrack had synchronized music and sound effects but no spoken dialogue. The dialogue was presented on intertitles. Chaplin was first contacted by inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste in 1918 about making a sound film, but he never ended up meeting with Lauste. Chaplin was dismissive about "talkies" and told a reporter that he would "give the talkies three years, that's all." He was also concerned about how to adjust the Little Tramp to sound films.
In early 1928, Chaplin began writing the script with Harry Carr. The plot gradually grew from an initial concept Chaplin had considered after the success of The Circus, where a circus clown goes blind and has to conceal his handicap from his young daughter by pretending that his inability to see is an on-going series of pratfalls. This inspired the Blind Girl. The first scenes Chaplin thought up were of the ending, where the newly cured blind girl sees the Little Tramp for the first time. A highly detailed description of the scene was written, as Chaplin considered it to be the center of the entire film.
For a subplot, Chaplin first considered a character even lower on the social scale, a black newsboy. Eventually he opted for a drunken millionaire, a character previously used in the 1921 short The Idle Class. The millionaire plot was based on an old idea Chaplin had for a short in which two millionaires pick up the Little Tramp from the city dump and show him a good time in expensive clubs before dropping him back off at the dump, so when he woke up, the Tramp would not know if it was real or a dream. This was rewritten into a millionaire who is the Tramp's friend when drunk but does not recognize him when sober.
Chaplin officially began pre-production of the film in May 1928 and hired Australian art director Henry Clive to design the sets that summer. Chaplin eventually cast Clive in the role of the millionaire. Although the film was originally set in Paris, the art direction is inspired by a mix of several cities. Robert Sherwood said that "it is a weird city, with confusing resemblances to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangiers and Council Bluffs. It is no city on earth and it is all cities."
On August 28, 1928, Chaplin's mother Hannah Chaplin died at the age of 63. Chaplin was distraught for several weeks and pre-production did not resume until mid fall of 1928. Psychologist Stephen Weissman has hypothesized that City Lights is highly autobiographical, with the blind girl representing Chaplin's mother, while the drunken millionaire represents Chaplin's father. Weissman also compared many of the film's sets with locations from Chaplin's real childhood, such as the statue in the opening scene resembling St. Mark's Church on Kennington Park Road and Chaplin referring to the waterfront set as the Thames Embankment.
Chaplin had interviewed several actresses to play the blind flower girl but was unimpressed with them all. While seeing a film shoot with bathing women in a Santa Monica beach, he found a casual acquaintance, Virginia Cherrill. Cherrill waved and asked if she would ever get the chance to work with him. After a series of poor auditions from other actresses, Chaplin eventually invited her to do a screen test. She was the first actress to subtly and convincingly act blind on camera due to her near-sightedness, and Cherrill signed a contract on November 1, 1928.