Hardy Perennial

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.

Re-issued after 19 more years of talking pictures, City Lights is more impressive than ever.* It is immensely funny, at times touching, and its storytelling is so eloquently visual that it makes most sound movies seem like the stunted products of a half-forgotten art.

The 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.

When the tramp finally gets the money needed by the blind girl for an eye operation, he is thrown unjustly into jail. After he gets out he finds the girl again, but this time, thanks to his generosity, she can see. The picture ends with a haunting scene: the heroine's shattering realization that her benefactor is the tramp, and his tremulously mixed reaction of joy and shame.

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 a prizefight into an uproarious ballet in which he and his murderous opponent dance briskly around a dancing referee.

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 on the run.

Every inch a classic, City Lights should endure as long as anything on film. After a steady diet of movies that talk more than they move, cinemaddicts may find that it whets their appetite for other Chaplin pictures that United Artists plans to reissue: Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux.

* In its original review of City Lights (Feb. 9, 1931), TIME said: "Critics agree that [Chap lin], whose posterior would probably be recognized by more people throughout the world than would recognize any other man's face, will be doing business after talkies have been traded in for television."

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