Chaplin's classic rom-com still cherished

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Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in 1931's silent classic City Lights.

It's both a crowd-pleaser and a poetic masterpiece; a laughfest and a heartbreaker.

Nearly 80 years after its release, Charlie Chaplin's hilarious and poignant silent film City Lights is still ranked by many critics as cinema's greatest romantic comedy.

On Thursday, the 1931 classic will have a rare big-screen showing at the Centennial Concert Hall. The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra will play the original score, written by "Charles" Chaplin, as he billed himself when composing.

City Lights is the story of a homeless tramp who falls for a blind flower-seller. He has a series of misadventures -- including moviedom's funniest boxing match -- as he tries to come up with $1,000 for an eye operation to restore the angelic girl's sight.

The flower-seller mistakenly believes the tramp is a millionaire. Meanwhile, an actual millionaire becomes a generous friend to the tramp, but only when he's drunk.

George Toles, a longtime University of Manitoba film professor and silent-film devotee, says City Lights "creates this improbable meeting place of high art and wide-open popular entertainment" and ranks, for him, as "one of the greatest movies I know."

Chaplin, Toles says, showed "spectacular bravery" by defiantly releasing a pantomime film three years after talkies had revolutionized Hollywood. The blend of comedy and pathos seems effortless, but the perfectionist filmmaker -- producer, screenwriter, director, star and composer -- agonized over every frame.

It took Chaplin six fretful months, Toles says, to work out precisely how the blind girl would jump to the conclusion that the tramp was rich. The solution came in the simple sound of a car door closing.

Chaplin's musical score "makes utter, beguiling sense as the only conceivable music" for the story, Toles says.

For Toles, other aspects of the movie's greatness include its layered exploration of the theme of "sight and insight;" its dig at the talkies in a statue-unveiling scene in which pompous dignitaries squawk unintelligibly; its priceless sight gags, such as one in which the faux-millionaire tramp snatches a cigar butt from another vagrant; and its subversive gay subtext in the boxing locker room.

City Lights found a huge audience in its time. Decades later, most university students of the 1970s through SSRq90s responded to it. But Toles says he stopped teaching it about 10 years ago. Over a period of two or three years, for some mysterious cultural reason, it had started to leave students cold.

"Many great films go through these phases of audience remoteness," he says. It's possible, he adds, that the movie would now reach students again. But he's reluctant to risk the spurning of an artwork he so cherishes, particularly since in his eyes, the ending of City Lights is a supreme achievement.

It's the moment when the flower girl, who has regained her sight, perceives that her benefactor is a ragged little vagabond -- and Charlie, in heart-rending closeup, sees that she sees.

"I still feel that the place to begin understanding what film is, is the last scene in City Lights," says Toles. "For me, there's no greater scene in movies than that."

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 C6