Officially, this Soviet-era Ukrainian silent is a paean to collective farming, crafted around a family drama, but its director, Alexander Dovzhenko, was a born renegade, for whom plots were far less important than poetry. EarthĮarth, capped by that avowedly secular title, is a lyrical, carnal movie about birth, death, sex and rebellion.

Blind no more, the girl slowly realises that the hobo in front of her is her secret benefactor, and the flicker of conflicting feelings on Chaplin's face – humility and joy – vindicate his decision to stay silent. Nothing, though, is more important than the final scene, still powerful in its ambivalence.

Though there are the usual sight gags in the Little Tramp's quest to find the money with which to restore the girl's sight, City Lights is more a film about personal relationships: a key figure in the film is a rich businessman who only recognises his new friend when drunk. (Critic Andrew Sarris described the character as being a model of sophisticated self-containment – 'his own Don Quixote and his own Sancho Panza'). Indeed, the whole film hinges in some way on the Little Tramp being outside time: Chaplin deliberately plays him as a relic, a figure of fun for the street-corner newspaper boys, yet at the same time self-aware.

In retrospect, this isn't so much the precious behaviour of a purist but the smart reaction of an experienced comedian Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically 'silent', City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects.Īt its heart, Chaplin's film is a mismatched love story in the vein of DW Griffiths' Broken Blossoms, made some 10 years earlier, but Chaplin knowingly modernises it, moving the location from the seedy docks of Limehouse to the bustle of the city centre, where Chaplin's vagrant falls for a blind flower-seller. City Lights was arguably the biggest risk of Charlie Chaplin's career: The Jazz Singer, released at the end of 1927, had seen sound take cinema by storm, but Chaplin resisted the change-up, preferring to continue in the silent tradition.

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