Two silent films on the same Moviecation list!? I know, crazy, and this isn’t even the last black and white film.
So, the plot is simple. A Tramp (Chaplin) falls in love with a poor blind woman, while simultaneously developing a friendship with an eccentric billionaire. Shenanigans abound.
This is my third Chaplin film, after seeing Gold Rush when I first started my Film Bucketlist (it’s the second film I ever reviewed on this blog!), and then The Kidfor a class. I think Gold Rush kind of set me up for an idea that all of his films are high concept and massive in scope, when really the other two have been just kind of simplistic. Not that that makes them bad, I’m just a millenial with a bad attention span.
From the neck down Chaplin looks like a 13 year old boy here. ANYWAY, this one also includes a long bit where Chaplin needs money to help his love interest, so he thinks he’s going to be boxing in a rigged match, but ends up boxing with someone who has no problem pummeling him.
Also, doing some research (cough Wikipedia), I found that Chaplin started the film at the dawn of the talkies, when films finally started having sound. He is quoted as saying “give the talkies three years, that’s all,” but boy was he wrong! It’s been 88 years since The Jazz Singer, the first film to have synchronized dialogue, was released in 1927.
Another interesting fact about the film was that Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill, who played “The Blind Girl,” did not get along at all. Chaplin spent weeks filming and re-filming the first scene where they meet, but later attributed the tension to stress. He even fired her once, before having to hire her back when he couldn’t find a replacement. Whether Chaplin’s stress came from pressure from his studio or otherwise, the animosity does not come across in the film.
The film performed very well, making $5 million on a $1.5 million budget (during the Depression! And during the decline of silent films!). When in premiered at the Los Angeles Theater in 1931, Albert Einstein and his wife were the guests of honor. It’s #35 on the IMDb Top 250 and #11 on the AFI Top 100 (moving my highest unseen film from #11 to #20, It’s A Wonderful Life).
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