City Lights

• 1. Introduction

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  City Lights opened on the 30th of January 1931 at the Los Angeles Theater, with Albert Einstein and his wife sitting as guests of honor. The audience gave it a standing ovation. That night, a silent film was being celebrated at the height of the talking-picture era, and the man who made it had already told a reporter he would give talkies "three years, that's all."

  Charlie Chaplin had written, produced, directed, and starred in City Lights, as he had done with his earlier films. But this one was different. He was working without spoken dialogue at a moment when the rest of Hollywood had moved on. He was composing his own musical score for the first time. And he was staking everything on a final scene that, eighteen years after its release, a critic named James Agee would call "the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid."

  The questions the film raises are deceptively simple. How does a man with no money or status convince a blind woman he is wealthy? And what happens to that illusion the moment she can see? Those questions drove Chaplin through nearly two years of filming, a mountain of discarded footage, and at least one lawsuit. The answers would eventually place City Lights at number 11 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest American films ever made.

• 2. A Silent Film in a Talking World

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  Chaplin's previous feature, The Circus, was released in 1928, just as synchronized sound changed the industry. Because Chaplin was a part-owner of United Artists and his own producer, he could still choose to make a silent film. He did not make that choice lightly.

  As early as 1918, Chaplin had been contacted by inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste about making a sound film. He never met with Lauste. By 1928, when "talkies" had taken over, Chaplin's concern was specific: he could not see how to adapt the Little Tramp to a voice. The Tramp was a creature of movement, of gesture, of expression. Giving him words seemed to Chaplin like a kind of erasure.

  City Lights occupied a technical middle ground. It had a synchronized musical score and sound effects but no spoken dialogue. The few words characters exchange appear on intertitles, the old silent-film method. Film critic Eric D. Snider later observed that by 1931, most Hollywood filmmakers had either embraced talkies, resigned themselves to their inevitability, or simply stopped making films. Chaplin held firm.

  Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance described City Lights as "an act of defiance," noting that it premiered four years into the sound era that had begun with The Jazz Singer in 1927. That defiance came with risk. Chaplin had spent $60,000 on advertising for the New York release alone, frustrated with what United Artists' publicists had produced. He demanded half of the total gross and pushed for higher ticket prices than talkies commanded, betting that audiences would come for the film rather than its technology.

• 3. The Blind Girl and the Millionaire

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  The plot of City Lights turns on two relationships, and Chaplin developed them both from older ideas he had been carrying for years. The Tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl, played by Virginia Cherrill, after she mistakes him for a wealthy man when a car door slams shut as he walks away. He then cycles in and out of the life of an alcoholic millionaire, played by Harry Myers, who befriends the Tramp effusively when drunk but fails to recognize him when sober.

  The millionaire character came from a sketch Chaplin had imagined earlier, in which two rich men take the Little Tramp from a city dump for a night of expensive entertainment, then return him to the dump so that he wakes unsure whether it was real. The drunken millionaire who only knows the Tramp when intoxicated is a refinement of that idea, and the character had appeared in an earlier Chaplin short, The Idle Class, from 1921.

  The blind girl had a different origin. Chaplin had first imagined a circus clown who goes blind and hides it from his daughter through a series of pratfalls. That concept was eventually distilled into the flower girl, and Chaplin considered her final scene, where she sees the Tramp clearly for the first time, to be the center of the entire film. He wrote a highly detailed description of that scene before he had written most of the rest of the script.

  Psychologist Stephen Weissman later proposed that the film was autobiographical. Chaplin's mother Hannah died on the 28th of August 1928 at the age of 63, during pre-production, and Weissman hypothesized that the blind girl represents her while the drunken millionaire represents Chaplin's father. Weissman also noted parallels between the film's sets and locations from Chaplin's childhood, including the opening statue scene resembling St. Mark's Church on Kennington Park Road.

• 4. The Long Making of a Short Film

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  Principal photography began on the 27th of December 1928 and did not end until September 1930, nearly two years later. In that time, Chaplin shot 314,256 feet of film. The finished picture ran 8,093 feet, a shooting ratio of approximately 38.8 to 1.

  The first scene filmed was the flower stand meeting between the Tramp and the blind girl. It took weeks, and it was where the tensions between Chaplin and Cherrill began. Filming on that scene continued until February 1929, then resumed for ten days in early April, before Chaplin set it aside. He then shot the opening monument scene with up to 380 extras, while construction at Chaplin Studios made conditions difficult because the city of Los Angeles had widened La Brea Avenue and forced him to move several buildings.

  The millionaire's poolside scene brought its own crisis. Henry Clive, the Australian art director Chaplin had hired to design the sets and then cast in the millionaire role, refused at the last minute to jump into a tank of cold water. Chaplin fired him on the spot. He was replaced by Harry Myers, whom Chaplin had known from his days at Keystone Studios.

  Late in production, tensions with Cherrill reached a breaking point. She asked during one shoot if she could leave early for a hair appointment. Chaplin fired her and replaced her with Georgia Hale, his co-star from The Gold Rush. Chaplin liked Hale's screen test but recognized he had already shot far too much footage to reshoot all of Cherrill's scenes. He briefly considered sixteen-year-old actress Violet Krauth before his collaborators talked him out of it. He ultimately rehired Cherrill, who negotiated a raise to $75 per week. Approximately seven minutes of test footage of Hale survived and was later included on the DVD release; excerpts first appeared in the documentary Unknown Chaplin.

  The iconic final scene, filmed in September 1930, took six days. Chaplin said afterward that Cherrill had finally understood the role, and he described the scene in his own words: "I'm not acting. Almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking. It's a beautiful scene, beautiful, and because it isn't over-acted."

• 5. Chaplin Composes

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  City Lights was the first film for which Chaplin composed the score himself, and the process was chaotic in its own way. By the 1930s, most theaters had dismissed their orchestras, so a synchronized recorded score was the only practical way to give the film music. Critics accused Chaplin of writing his own score to claim credit, but his family background put the charge in context: both his parents and many members of the Chaplin family were musicians.

  Chaplin worked with arranger Arthur Johnston over six weeks. His method was unorthodox. He told a reporter: "I really didn't write it down. I la-laed and Arthur Johnston wrote it down, and I wish you would give him credit because he did a very good job. It is all simple music, you know, in keeping with my character." The score included over one hundred musical cues and was recorded in five days with musical arranger Alfred Newman.

  The central leitmotif for the blind flower girl was the song "La Violetera," subtitled "Who'll Buy my Violets," written by Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin had tried to cast the song's original performer, Raquel Meller, in the lead role, and when that proved impossible, he used her song as a major theme anyway without crediting Padilla. A lawsuit followed, decided against Chaplin in Paris, where Padilla lived. Some later editions released for video used a new recording by Carl Davis in place of the original score.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  Two weeks before the gala premiere, Chaplin held an unpublicized preview at Los Angeles' Tower Theatre. The crowd was small and unenthusiastic. Chaplin went to the January 30th premiere at the Los Angeles Theater shaken. What followed confounded his fears.

  The New York engagement at the George M. Cohan Theater ran for twelve weeks, contributing an estimated $2 million in American theatrical rentals alone. A critic for the Los Angeles Examiner wrote that it produced "such an orgy of laughs" as hadn't been seen since the early two-reel Chaplin comedies. The New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall called it "a film worked out with admirable artistry." Not everyone agreed: Alexander Bakshy of The Nation called it "Chaplin's feeblest," objecting to the silent format and what he saw as over-sentimentality. The worldwide rental figure from the initial release reached $4.25 million.

  Chaplin followed the American opening with a sixteen-day world tour beginning in late February and early March 1931, starting with a premiere at London's Dominion Theatre on the 27th of February.

  Over the following decades, the film drew praise from a remarkable range of filmmakers. Orson Welles named it his favorite film. In a 1963 interview in the American magazine Cinema, Stanley Kubrick ranked it fifth among his top ten. In 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky also placed it fifth among his top ten and said of Chaplin: "He is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of a doubt. The films he left behind can never grow old." Robert Bresson placed City Lights first and second on his top ten. In the 2003 documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen called it Chaplin's best picture. Allen is said to have based the final scene of his 1979 film Manhattan on the film's conclusion.

  In 1991, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for the United States National Film Registry. In 1952, Sight and Sound magazine's first-ever poll for the best films of all time placed it second, behind Vittorio DeSica's Bicycle Thieves. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it four out of four stars and included it in his Great Movies list. Chaplin's original Tramp costume from the film was donated by Chaplin himself to the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County.