City Heights
Screening CITY LIGHTS for students — not seen it for years, myself — I was thunderstruck by the bizarre cross-resonance generated at the end of the film. Released from prison, Charlie goes brokenly in search of the blind flower seller, revisiting the places he knows her from, without success. Then he wanders past a flower shop —
Wow. Just wow.
Not because CITY LIGHTS has a transcendentally beauteous ending — which it does — but because I suddenly flashed on a very different movie with a strikingly similar moment.
A Chaplinesque image, no? Think THE GOLD RUSH.
Released from hospital, Jimmy goes brokenly in search of the blind flower seller, revisiting the places he knows her from, without success. Then he wanders past a flower shop —
I can’t even begin to process this. (I will now begin to process this.) I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Hitchcock admired Chaplin, indeed I’d be surprised if he did not. I seem to recall they met and discussed whether Hitch should adopt American citizenship (he did; Chaplin remained “A citizen of the world.”) But I never thought in terms of influence. And I would never have picked VERTIGO as a likely conduit for that influence. (What would I have picked?) Of course, it’s impossible to be sure there’s any conscious or even actual influence at work here — but it suddenly and epiphanically felt like there was.
shadowplay 
March 21, 2011 at 10:51 am
Chaplin makes a brief cameo appearance in A Woman of Paris. He’s the railway porter who carries in a large box and dumps it on the platform just as Marie arrives at the station for her elopement. It’s said that Hitchcock got the idea for his cameos from this, but I don’t know of any evidence for that claim. Does anyone out there know more about this?
March 21, 2011 at 10:54 am
It wasn’t until I had the chance to see CITY LIGHTS on the big screen that I was captivated by the film. Those final scenes are amazing.
I watched Oshima’s brilliant BOY the other day.
March 21, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Great finds David and Judy about the possible Hitchcock/Chaplin connections
March 21, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Great find thereMr. Cairns. Chaplin is of course all gentleness where Hitchock plunges one into the abyss.
Boy is a masterpiece. It’s to Ozu’s light-spirited films about children as the scene in Vertigo is to the end of City Lights
March 21, 2011 at 2:36 pm
The intertitle “Yes, I can see now,” makes the CITY LIGHTS scene have a very different meaning indeed from VERTIGO, where the hero is blinded by illusions and glamours for the whole story — initially, the illusions created by Elster, but increasingly those he conjures for himself.
I guess the first Hitch cameo, in THE LODGER, really did happen because Hitch was short of extras. But the cameo in BLACKMAIL is of a different order — Hitch wants to be noticed, and recognized. Whether Chaplin’s cameo was an influence is probably unprovable, but it’s the same general kind of moment. Nice to think of the film, which wasn’t a hit, exerting such a massive influence on filmmakers — it seems to have greatly inspired Lubitsch too.
March 21, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Truffaut wrote in his afterword for his interview book that the two famous Londoners had a rivalry about whether Hitchcock would ever get a knighthood or not.
It’s very interesting this hitherto unknown connection. It’s been ages since I saw CITY LIGHTS myself. Technically it was the first silent movie I watched and naturally it was deeply moving and the final scene is testament to the evidence that Chaplin is the greatest of editors.
March 21, 2011 at 4:11 pm
I told my class that there are two classical ways of ending a film. The “walk off into the sunrise” is basically owned by Chaplin from The Tramp on through to Modern Times. The “reaction shot” is also owned by Chaplin because of this one film, which is the most sublime use of it.
Chaplin was always an easier case for a knighthood because his sins had all been committed in America, off the screen, and also America had rejected him. Hitchcock had few sins to his name, but he had made Psycho, and America embraced him.
Mrs Chaplin said, however, that the English would have loved Charlie if he’d died broke and miserable in obscurity, but they could never forgive him for dying rich, happy, famous and in Switzerland.
March 21, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Its nice in that first still how the different architectural points; The pillar and the lamp post, dwarf Chaplin with their insistent upright-ness, while he slumps.
March 21, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Speaking of slouching, there’s something Freudian about the two curved wrought iron railings that Chaplin seems to be fixing his gaze onto.
-ma-ma
March 21, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Well, that’s the spot where the blind girl used to sit, so it’s appropriately feminine.
March 21, 2011 at 6:39 pm
That must be one reason for the Keaton/Chaplin fans fistfight. The fate treasured by the English was bestowed on Keaton and he was American as they come.
I read this interview with Keaton and Studs Terkel and Keaton mentioned that A WOMAN IN PARIS was a major influence on him since it challenged him from what he learned from Roscoe Arbuckle. Arbuckle told Keaton to make a movie as if the audience was 12 year olds and Chaplin made A.W.I.P. for adults. He said that he always treated his audience as being as smart and resourceful as he was.
March 21, 2011 at 9:32 pm
why I can almost see those bratty newspaper boys try to pull at Jimmy’s tail as he bends over in front of the flower shop in search for Madeline..
March 21, 2011 at 11:07 pm
Heh.
Keaton didn’t end in poverty, but he certainly descended from stardom and riches into being a jobbing actor. His alcoholism was no longer an issue after the 1930s, and unlike many addicts he had no problem enjoying the occasional drink without relapsing. But his life story does form a more romantic tale than Chaplin’s, with its riches-to-rags side.
It’s arguable that Keaton’s treating his audiences like adults is the reason he came a poor third to Chaplin and Lloyd at the box office…
March 21, 2011 at 11:14 pm
Chaplin reaches for the sublime, and achieves it so simply as to take one’s breath away.
Moments like these are why the cinema was invented.
March 22, 2011 at 12:03 am
I don’t know why,for years there was always some doubt in my mind that she might not except him as he is in the end when it clearly shows that she does as she pulls his hand to her bosom..I guess I was overpowered by that slight look of guilt in Chapiln’s face..
March 22, 2011 at 1:13 am
>>>that’s the spot where the blind girl used to sit<<<<
Ashamed to say, but I've never fully seen City Lights., so I didn't know that was where the blind girl sat.
But it came across subliminally.
March 22, 2011 at 9:09 am
Well there is the scene cut from North By Northwest where Cary Grant gets stuck in the interior of the factory mechanism and tries escaping by twisting the enormous nut as he sits astride it.
Seeing City Lights years ago in a cinema with a live musical accompaniment conducted by Carl Davis just magnified the beauty. The tears. The manly sniffling.
The wonderful Brownlow & Gill documentary, Unknown Chaplin (finally released in Aus this month) has a fascinating sequence on the making of City Lights and how Chaplin ingeniously resolved a plot movement as he filmed. You could almost see the thought processes working in front of you. Magnificent.
March 22, 2011 at 9:22 am
Oh, that’s great.
Hitch DID propose a sequence for North by Northwest in a car assembly line in Detroit — a vehicle is built from scratch, and as it rolls off the line, the door is opened, and a body falls out. But whether there was a Modern Times influence there is highly uncertain.