025 - City Lights, 1931, United States; Dir. Charles Chaplin.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

025 - City Lights, 1931, United States.  Dir. Charles Chaplin.

Watching City Lights is pure joy.

The fact that is so funny is the icing on the cake.  Beneath that is a movie that is all heart.

All heart.

The Tramp loves with the purest of love.

He loves a girl with devoted affection.

He loves a friend with honest friendship.

He meets a Blind Girl who sells flowers.  Through a series of funny circumstances, she thinks he is a millionaire.  He does not realize it.  He just loves her.

He meets an alcoholic Eccentric Millionaire.  Through a series of funny circumstances, he saves his life.  The man treats him as best friends when he is drunk but does not remember him when he is sober.

Meanwhile, The Tramp just keeps loving.

And bumbling.

And seeking the means to provide surgery for the Girl's healing.

In 1931, The Tramp was the most recognized character in the world.  Today, he continues to rank alongside Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald as being recognized by the majority of people in nearly every country.

Charlie Chaplin made his name on slapstick and pantomime.  He was the king of the movies and had complete independence, owning his own studios.  Would that change with the advent of sound?

Sound had now been available for three years, and Chaplin had chosen, on purpose, to make another silent movie--or at least a movie in which there is no talking.  It had taken him two years and eight months to complete what had been his most difficult and arduous undertaking.  On top of all that, the stock market had crashed.

Chaplin was taking a great risk.

When the movie came out it was an international critical and popular triumph, and it was the height of his career.  He had done it again.  And it was better than ever.

This movie does actually have sound, just not dialogue.  It contains a musical score, which Chaplin wrote himself!  And it contains sound affects, such as people talking in nonsensical sounds--which a later generation would recognize in the adult speech of Peanuts--and Chaplin hiccupping in whistles after having gotten a whistle stuck in his throat.

The sight gags abound.

City Lights opens with the unveiling of a new statue to progress and prosperity.  The city's elite are present.  They remove the sheet.  The Tramp is asleep atop the statue, where he has presumably spent the night.  The city's elders are shocked.  In his polite efforts to come down, he gets his pants hooked on the statue's sword, and he stands and sits in positions that are witty in their imagery.

The Tramp meets the Blind Girl as she is selling flowers.  He ducks into a car on one side and ducks out on the other.  She hears the car door and believes he is the millionaire exiting the limousine.  As he helps her find a dropped flower and realizes she is blind, he falls in love with her.  He will seek her out and seek to help her for the rest of the movie.

The Tramp saves the life of the drunk Millionaire.  As the Millionaire tries to tie a noose around his own neck, he gets it tied around The Tramp's neck, and The Tramp falls into the water.  They will both end up in and out of the water before all is resolved.

The Tramp finds himself in a boxing match, where he uses the referee to block himself from the punches of the real fighter, in a highly choreographed, symmetrical dance of a scene.

The Tramp and the Millionaire attend a party where chairs are pulled out from under people, where he gets thwarted by cigars, eats a streamer as spaghetti, and gets into inadvertent fights over misunderstandings.

Chaplin was willing to do whatever it took to get the shot.

He would spend days on a single moment, weeks on a single scene.  It was not indulgent.  It was working to a standard.  He did it until it was right.  And good for us that his judgment was sure.

He used special effects that were ahead of their time, many of which he invented.

He also knew how to edit.  He cut a scene from the movie which he had spent a week filming, because it did not fit the story.

When it was finished, he had spent 190 days of filming.

The filmmaking was challenging, but the film looks effortless.  It flows steadily and smoothly, and it hits in all the right moments.

City Lights contains one of the greatest lines in the history of film, a line delivered on a card since it was not spoken, a line consisting of a single word.

"You?"

And with that line and the two that follow, a moment is realized that has moved the hearts of generations of people around the world.

Chaplin himself would watch it years later and be amazed, saying that he was not acting in that moment.  Something else was going on.

City Lights is a movie of movies.  Its emotional impact is why we go to the movies.

It is the definition of movie magic.