Dan Navarro's Movie Reviews |
City Lights(1931)Released four years after the birth of the talkies, the silent City Lights has a lush musical score (composed by its director and star, Charles Chaplin) and synchronized sound effects, but no dialogue. Chaplin's story of a tramp who befriends a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) contains some of the most inventive comedy turns ever filmed, and some of the finest pathos. The famous closing scene, where the now-cured flower girl sees her benefactor—the tramp—for the first time, is a heart-rending mixture of joy and sadness. James Agee wrote: "It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies." Of that scene, Al Capp wrote: "...because he is the most understanding and exquisite of artists, Chaplin's final tragedy became somehow our tragedy. He entered into us." |
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![[City Lights]](../images/reviewimages/citylights.jpg "[City Lights]")
CITY LIGHTS (1931) This is the famous closing scene, the apotheosis of gut-wrenching pathos in all of cinema. But don't think of City Lights as a melodrama. Writer-director Charles Chaplin fills it with many, many funny sequences, and the effect is sheer bliss.
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Copyright 2005 Dan Navarro
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