City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
Classic silent film from the legendary Chaplin. One of his most famous films, it follows Chaplin's iconic Tramp persona through his interlinked relationships with two people, a millionaire who is his best friend when drunk but claims not to recognise him when sober, and a blind woman who sells flowers to pay the rent on the house where she lives with her grandmother. By taking advantage of the millionaire's drunken generosity, he tries to help the blind woman with her rent and eventually a revolutionary new eye-surgery that will cure her blindness.
While at first it comes across as a fluffy romantic comedy full of pratfalls and some almost magic-realist elements (no prizes for guessing where Woody Allen got a great deal of inspiration from) the film deals with the subjects of wealth and class in a serious manner, mocking the hedonism of the rich, lamenting the miseries of the poor, and, through the blind girl, exploring to some degree the phenomenon of the nouveau riche. The film's ambiguous climax is sudden and abrupt, and forgoes the easy path of the happy ending, doing so with great flair and poignancy.
While the skeleton of the film, its plot (no matter how far-fetched), its themes and its overall charming presentation go a long way to "justifying," in lieu of a better term, its classic status, its comedy scenes, for all their great timing and inventiveness, have a tendency to exhibit diminishing returns, as each gag doubles over on itself in a sort of ABA theme/modulation/recapitulation. This is all good and well as a technical exercise in comic theory, but as an actual piece of on-screen entertainment it has quite little reason to be there in that form, and my feeling is that a little more economy and concision would have served the story much better. If there is a failing of the film it is simply its need to prove that it is despite all else still a comedy, where in the works of Chaplin's great contemporary Buster Keaton the comedy is natural, ineffable, a permanent and self-assured fixture that one never doubts. Indeed, Keaton was the greater comedian, Chaplin the greater social commentator.
It's certainly hard not to like City Lights. It's a truly charming picture which, for all its romantic naivete, remains near enough believable for the viewer who has a healthy willingness to go along for the ride. While some scenes may drag here and there the 70 minute runtime is breezy enough, and the relationship between the Tramp and the Blind Woman, in particular its not-quite-conclusion, is beautifully depicted ─ the film is well worth watching for this alone. While the comedy is, as I have said, somewhat ungainly owing to its need to proudly display itself, rather than playing for greater subtlety, the film remains fresh thanks to its starkly original and wonderfully ambiguous ending, and its themes of social inequality are still very much relevant today.