Ken Classics Week: City Lights
Charlie Chaplin splits his screen time wringing sentiment from a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and exchanging pratfalls with a suicidal millionaire (imbiber impersonator extraordinaire Harry Myers) who, when sober, couldn’t pick him out of a line up. It is through a series of miscommunications that hobo Charlie gets the money needed to restore eyesight to the objectified waif. Chaplin had reached such a level of world-wide popularity by this point that he was able to get away with producing a silent picture years after talkies had became the norm. (He sold the film as “a comedy romance in pantomime.”) In my youth, tears were shed over the climactic promise of unanswered love resolved. Today, all I hear during their celebrated exchange of closeups is, “Thanks for the picking up the tab for the operation and all, but you’re a tramp, mister!" — Scott Marks