Word: chaplinitis
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City Lights (United Artists) was Charlie Chaplin's first movie of the sound-film era. Released in 1931, three years after the birth of the talkies, and billed as a comedy romance "in pantomime," it all but ignored sound. The film was Chaplin's stubborn, inspired rebuke to a screen which, in learning how to talk, seemed to have forgotten how to do anything else...
...film presents Producer-Scripter-Composer-Director Chaplin in his classic role as a tramp with the instincts of a gentleman. He falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) who takes him for a handsome millionaire. To help her out of difficulties as he nurtures her illusion, Chaplin leans mostly on his acquaintance with a real' millionaire (the late Harry Myers), an eccentric who showers him with favors and affection while drunk and rejects him while sober...
Using few titles, Chaplin tells the simple, ironic story with expert pantomime, fills it out with no end of comic invention. In his nightclubbing adventures with the millionaire, he never gives the audience a chance to stop laughing. He leaps gallantly to the defense of the abused lady in an apache dance team; he munches steadily ceilingward on a string of confetti that gets snarled in his spaghetti; he tries repeatedly to light his cigar but succeeds only in lighting the cigar that the millionaire is waving airily before his face. In another sequence, beautifully timed and sustained, he turns...
...Chaplin's use of the sound track is sparing but excellent. His own brilliant musical score has the double virtue of being perfectly appropriate and independently memorable. In his opening scenes, showing civic stuffed shirts unveiling a monument, the speeches come through as squeaky noises that are at once a spoof of the speakers' pomposity and a nose-thumbing Chaplin commentary on the ya-ta-ta of the early talkies. He uses sound again when he swallows a whistle and his squealing hiccups bring dogs and taxicabs...
These are sad days for the American comedy. Within the last few years Milton Berle became Mr. Television, Charlie Chaplin withdrew "Monsieur Verdoux" from circulation, W. C. Fields died and now the Marx brothers have been cast in a backstage musical...