- I feel like I should apologize for merely enjoying Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. After all, this is the film that the AFI named as the #1 romantic comedy of all time and that (if Wikipedia is to be believed) was revered by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Orson Welles, and Stanley Kubrick. The IMDB ranks it more modestly at #67 out of their top 250 films, but the fact that #66 is Monty Python and the Holy Grail probably tells you how seriously to take that number. In my own humble estimation, City Lights is a very good film that has a few moments of brilliance. Maybe not enough to merit a single-digit number, but thankfully it is not my goal to be that precise.
- As expected, the plot of City Lights depicts the trials and tribulations of Chaplin's Little Tramp. The two main threads linking this particular story together are his attempts to support the object of his affections, the blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill), and his inconstant friendship with the millionaire (Harry Myers). Maybe this will seem unromantic, but I was much more impressed with the millionaire, whose drinking is an essential ingredient for his friendship with the Tramp. The two meet first meet when the millionaire's suicide attempts prove more dangerous for the Tramp than for himself, and their joint debauchery eventually creates some very memorable adventures in a long-noodled Italian restaurant and at a party with an inadvertently swallowed noise-maker. The latter gag should feel stale enough by now, but Chaplin's fantastically expressive face somehow makes it seem new.
- Unfortunately, I found the scenes with the flower girl to be considerably less interesting than those with the millionaire. I realize that the Tramp is more than just a comic character, but I continue to be underwhelmed by his attempts at romance or drama. Even the film's famous final scene in which the flower girl recognizes the Tramp as her benefactor has, in my mind, aged much more poorly than the film's comic bits. Fortunately, the Tramp's attempts to earn money for the girl are very amusing, especially when he takes on two very different careers. As a street-sweeper, he is dismayed to watch a parade of horses give way to an elephant. As a boxer, he does everything he can to keep the referee between himself and the other fighter and even manages at one point to get the bell rope wound around his neck. Both scenes are absolutely magnificent in a way that his more dramatic scenes, quite frankly, are not.
