In his review of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Roger Ebert said that the Tramp’s perennial pantomiming wasn’t just a product of the silent era but could even be justified during an era of sound: “There was perfect logic here. Speech was not how the Tramp expressed himself.” He’s correct, of course. As we watch most other silent film characters, we create some sort of version in our heads of what they would sound like if we could hear them speak. Conversely, we have no desire to hear the Tramp talk, and it would be weird if he could. “The Tramp is a mime to his core.” (Another silent character whom this may be true for is Conrad Veidt’s Gwynplaine in Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs.)

Released in 1931, City Lights is Chaplin’s first picture during the age of the talkie. However, it is no talkie, and even makes fun of the ostensible superfluousness of sound in movies. While the filmmaker may be a bit harsh — not everyone could get by as exceptionally using only physical storytelling as Chaplin could — the sentiment makes for a brilliant end result. That is not to say that there is no diabetic sound in the movie at all. Noises and sound effects are used inventively, whether to drive home a joke about a whistle stuck in the Tramp’s throat or to reveal a gun being fired. Regardless, City Lights is a silent film through and through.

In some of Chaplin’s films, the Tramp has come into situations that have given him the upper hand, such as when he strikes it rich in The Gold Rush or becomes a beloved circus performer for his inherent physical abilities (and unintentional goofiness) in The Circus. However, in City Lights, it’s his humanity that wins him the approval of a drunk millionaire and a blind flower girl — two people who can’t ever truly see the transient bum for his cosmetic woes.

As a result of his relentless humanity, the Tramp earns a new best friend and a lover, respectively. However, at the end of it all, he must eventually give up the rewards that he’s earned. The drunk never remembers him in the morning and the blind girl elects for an innovative surgery that will restore her eyesight, leaving our protagonist ashamed of who he really is.

The lasting image of the film is undoubtedly the final sequence, when the flower girl finally sees the Tramp for what he is. On a verbal level, it’s a simple exchange. He asks her if she can “see” now, and she responds that she can. However, the indelible expressions on both performers are as complex as you can get. There is no afterward; we can assume they go off together. Yet we can only guess what the flower girl is capable of piecing together in her head: how, for the past few months, the bum was able to pay for her rent, her surgery, and her flowers, and what he must have gone through to do so.

Chaplin reserves this moment for the only close-up in the movie, and we can see why. Not only does it make this situation feel more intimate but we can, for the first time ever really, see the Tramp’s blemishes and imperfections blown up to scale, offering us the opportunity to become the flower girl ourselves. Would we take him as he is or would we be repulsed by his dirty face and rotten teeth?

If Chaplin’s predecessor The Circus is pure comedy with pathos sprinkled in, City Lights is the opposite. No longer experimenting with visual effects, the filmmaker is capable of taking his story head-on from a narrative perspective. He finds ways to implement his typical vignette format. We get to see the Tramp in a boxing match, at a nightclub, at a house party. The events are loosely related and become ways to inject comedy into the plot, yet never feel off-brand for Chaplin. And while the scenes with the flower girl may feel like they’re from a different movie entirely than the scenes with the millionaire, these seemingly discordant elements do in fact form a symbiotic relationship as far as the story is concerned.

Setups and payoffs are almost always subtle, delivered in ways that are buried beneath the surface, such as the hole in his pants that the Tramp gets in the first scene — a throwaway gag where a statue’s sword pierces his bottoms — which becomes crucial to the very final sequence, helping draw the attention of the flower girl.

If the other Tramp movies find comedy in the way their star schemes and becomes creative in his impudence, City Lights rewards the character for making sacrifices and being selfless. Not since The Kid a decade before had audiences seen this quality in the Tramp. Even though in that movie, his love for another human being — his newly adopted son — becomes more about survival than it does acts of thoughtfulness.

More than ever, there’s a sense in City Lights that the filmmaker actually wants to see his beloved character end up on top. And aside from in The Kid, we’ve never felt the need to root for him more.

Twizard Rating: 100