Chaplin's "Lights" still shines.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD

THIS YEAR IS THE 75TH anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's celebrated "City Lights" (1931), the film with possibly cinema's most memorable concluding scene. Film critic James Agee would accord the segment just that honor in his 1949 Life essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era." Agee's description of the poignant conclusion, where the once-blind flower girl finally sees Chaplin's romantically frustrated Tramp figure and finds him wanting, also has a poetry of its own: "He recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her lace. The camera just exchanges a few close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies."

What makes the "City Lights" conclusion the definitive example of comedy segueing to pathos? Well, Chaplin had been working toward this sort of tour de force ending for years. A special comedy component of the Chaplin milieu always had been as a caretaker for vulnerable young heroines who often later broke his heart. Ironically, Chaplin's leading lady from "City Lights" is not lost to an Arrow Shirt type hero, a la the young man of "The Tramp" or the equally dashing aerial artist of "The Circus" (1928). The Charlie of "City Lights" is competing with his own creation--the blind girl thinks her benefactor is a handsome young millionaire. The Tramp allows this innocent misperception to stand. Indeed, Chaplin tweaks his perennial outsider into the most unselfish of saviors. Falling in love with a beautiful blind girl, Chaplin moves the proverbial heaven and Earth to acquire the necessary cash for a sight-producing operation. While his assorted odd jobs, from street sweeper to boxer, do not pan out, his sometimes friendship with a forgetful millionaire (who only remembers the Tramp when he has been drinking) proves more profitable, but there is an unfortunate catch. Shortly alter receiving the money, an unrelated robbery attempt at the millionaire's mansion makes it appear that Charlie is a thief. Though Chaplin's underdog initially escapes and gets the operation funds to Virginia Cherrill's blind girl character, he ultimately is caught and does jail time.

Now, flash forward to sometime in the future. The Tramp is just out of prison, and he has not looked so bedraggled since his Mack Sennett beginnings (1914). The blind girl is not at her normal flower-selling location, but one knows she is on his...