City Lights

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Comedies and melodramas were the main genres of the silent film era: slapstick was the anarchic rebellion of the underdogs against the crass class relations of the time, while sentimentality was the conciliatory promise that a piece of happiness was yet within everyone's grasp. No one combined these two components more enchantingly than Charles Chaplin, perhaps most beautifully in the romantic burlesque City Lights, which was made three years after the dawn of the sound film era and which defies the talkative new age with distorted fragments of sentences, an astonishing orchestral track (partly) penned by Chaplin and some of his most unforgettable scenes. Chaplin, alias Charlie the Tramp, poses as a generous millionaire to a blind flower girl and puts himself under pressure: how is he, who doesn't have a nickel in his holey pockets, supposed to pay for the rent and the eye operation for the young woman who literally trusts him blindly? Seemingly fortunate, he crosses paths with a world-weary millionaire who mutates into a philanthropist when drunk, but after grueling stints as a night owl and boxer, the Tramp has to sacrifice his only asset, his freedom, to help the young woman. Chaplin heightens slapstick and sentiment with such virtuosity that the physical comedy becomes a ballet of movement and the heart a cognitive device. “I can see now”, says the healed flower girl ambiguously at the end when she recognizes the benefactor in the Tramp. Even almost a hundred years after it was made, it is hard to imagine a more beautiful ending to a film.