(image from imdb.com)
Last night, Tom and I watched City Lights. Charlie Chaplin plays a homeless man who falls in love with a blind girl and tries to earn enough money to pay for an operation that would allow her to see.
I'll be honest, I have a hard time really getting into a lot of older movies, especially if they're in black and white, classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane being the exception. This probably makes me sound like an uncultured jerk, but there it is. Anyway, having been released in 1931, City Lights is one of the oldest movies on the AFI list; not only is it old and in black and white, but it's also a silent film, and I don't think I'd ever seen one of those before. OK, I saw The Artist as part of my original 99 in 999, but I don't know if that counts. The point is, I was a bit skeptical about City Lights. The AFI named it as the 11th greatest movie of all time. Could it really live up to the hype?
I think it did. It's been said that 93% of all communication is nonverbal, and this movie really proved that to me. I was amazed by how I never had to wonder what was going on. You know, I think maybe we're spoiled by today's movies. We've been fooled into thinking that a film needs things like color and audible dialogue in order to be any good. City Lights told a sweet story very clearly, and it did so without color, dialogue or even character names. It had great acting, comedy, drama, and a happy ending. What more could you ask for?
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