Tomorrow the birds will sing ✵ City Lights - VISIONARIES ✵ 1902–1931 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Silent comedy

DIRECTOR

Charlie Chaplin

WRITER

Charlie Chaplin

STARS

Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Merrill, Harry Myers

BEFORE

1921 Chaplin makes his first feature movie, The Kid, with 13-year-old Lita Grey, whom he marries three years later.

1925 Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, his first blockbuster featuring the Tramp, is a huge success.

1927 The silent era comes to an end with The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length movie with full sound dialogue.

AFTER

1936 Chaplin makes Modern Times, his last silent feature, a protest against the Great Depression workers’ conditions.

Charlie Chaplin’s movie City Lights—which he wrote, directed, and starred in—was one of the last great movies of the silent era, acknowledged by many as one of the best comedies of all time. Although it was released in 1931, four years after the first real talkie, The Jazz Singer, Chaplin defiantly made City Lights a silent movie with only a few distorted sound effects and a sound track of his own music.

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The poster for the movie’s original release in 1931 makes full use of the audience’s recognition of Chaplin’s Tramp persona.

Tramp and the Flower Girl

The story begins in a large city, where Chaplin’s Tramp is fleeing from a policeman who threatens to arrest him for vagrancy. Escaping by climbing through a car, he meets a poor blind flower girl (played by Virginia Merrill). He buys a flower from her with his last coin, and the girl, hearing the sound of a luxury car door, believes he is a wealthy man.

Not judged as a vagrant by this blind girl, the Tramp falls in love with her and wants to be the rich and handsome benefactor she imagines him to be. He determines to rescue her from her life of poverty and when he hears of an operation that will restore her sight, he searches desperately for ways to raise the money to fund it, from sweeping the streets to getting beaten in a prizefight—vehicles for Chaplin’s trademark slapstick, bawdiness, and melodrama.

The Tramp also saves a millionaire who is threatening to commit suicide after his wife has left him. In return, the millionaire offers the Tramp $1,000 to help the girl. Unfortunately, the millionaire only sees the Tramp as a friend when he is blind drunk. When the millionaire sobers up, he accuses the Tramp of stealing the money. Going on the run, the Tramp gives the girl the money to pay for the sight operation, but is captured and thrown in jail.

A touching encounter

Finally, he is released from jail and finds himself outside the flower shop. In the window, the girl is arranging flowers. She has had the operation and can see. Full of kindness for the Tramp, who is now dressed in shabby clothes, the girl picks up the flower that has been knocked from his grasp by street kids, and as their hands touch, she suddenly recognizes him—so very different from the debonair prince she may have imagined. The Tramp looks anxiously into the eyes of the once-blind flower girl and asks, “You can see now?” “Yes,” she replies, “I can see now.”

This poignant exchange is one of the most famous dialogues in movie history—all the more telling because it comes from the silent era—and in many ways it is emblematic of the entire movie. It is not just the Tramp that the girl is seeing for the first time, but the truth, and the audience must see it too. In the noisy, brightly flashing world of the modern city, the little people, the downtrodden, and the lonely are forgotten and brushed aside. It is only through the purity of silence, simplicity, and blindness that people can regain their senses and learn to see clearly again.

Hope of tomorrow

The movie has a conservative and sentimental—some might even say mawkish—message, but there’s no doubt that it touched a chord on its release, just two years after the Wall Street Crash. Times were troubled for countless millions, the poor in the US were beginning to feel the pinch of the Great Depression, and suicides struck both the rich and the poor as the crisis deepened. While the movie offered no recipes for recovery, what it did, cleverly, was to provide a glimmer of hope. After rescuing the millionaire from suicide in the river, the Tramp urges him to be hopeful. “Tomorrow the birds will sing,” he says. No matter how bleak things look today, people must cling to the idea that there may be joy tomorrow—that seems to be the core of the movie’s message.

I’m cured. You’re my friend for life.”

The millionaire / City Lights

Happy ending?

When the flower girl finally sees the Tramp for who he really is, Chaplin the director does not immediately have them fall into each other’s arms in recognition. We do not know if the flower girl will embrace or reject him because he is so different from the man of her imagination. There is no neat happy ending.

While the Tramp’s winsome look elicits pathos, it also restores the movie to a comic level, distancing the audience from the pain of his possible rejection. But as the flower girl looks back at him and viewers see the thoughts turning over behind her eyes and the faintly fluttering flares of hope, that’s enough. It’s not clear what that hope is—that she will find her true happiness with such a bedraggled man, or that they will both walk away, wiser but content. All that matters is that there is hope, the hope inspired by the thought that the birds will sing tomorrow, come what may.

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The boxing scene, in which the Tramp spends most of his time hiding behind the referee or running from his opponent to avoid combat, shows off Chaplin’s clowning skills.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN Director

Actor-director Charlie Chaplin was the biggest star of silent movies. Born in London in 1889, he survived a childhood beset by poverty. His alcoholic father abandoned his singer mother, who was later committed to an asylum. These early experiences inspired the character of the outcast Tramp. As a teenager, Chaplin joined a circus troupe and an impresario took him to the US. By age 26, he was a star with his own movie company. He made a string of hit silent movies before his first talkie, the anti-Hitler satire The Great Dictator. He died in 1977.

Key movies

1921 The Kid

1925 The Gold Rush

1931 City Lights

1936 Modern Times

1940 The Great Dictator

What else to watch: The Gold Rush (1925) ✵ The General (1926) ✵ Metropolis (1927) ✵ Modern Times (1936) ✵ A Patch of Blue (1965) ✵ Chaplin (1992) ✵ The Artist (2011)