#11 City Lights (1931)

So, here we are. One last go-around with The Little Tramp.

Plot summary: Some high falutin' muckety-mucks are having a ribbon cutting ceremony in honor of a new statue in the middle of town square or whatever. There's a blanket over the statute. The mayor or whoever has his assistant rip off the blanket--revealing a sleeping Little Tramp, curled up on the statue's lap. They yell at him to get down and he does, but it takes like half and hour and he falls a lot and is flustered and I think I've seen this movie before. No, wait. It's just exactly the same as his other two movies on this list. So then he goes walking along the sidewalk and he almost keeps falling into a hole in the sidewalk. Well, it's not really a hole. The sidewalk...goes down...like an elevator? Just one piece of it goes down and then I guess people down below who were maybe on the subway get on it and it lifts them right up onto the street above. Was this real? There's no cones, no signs, just a park of the freaking sidewalk lowers without warning. Amazing.
Anyway, Charlie is window shopping and he almost steps backward into the hole like twenty five times. Then he moves on. He encounters a blind girl selling flowers. He's smitten with her and buys one and then totters away. Of course, this process takes twenty minutes and there's lots of wacky slapstick involved, but you could just infer that, right?
Then that night, Charlie sees a drunk old man tying a rope around his neck. At the other end of the rope is a giant rock. The man picks up the rock and walks over to the riverbank nearby, intending to end it all. Charlie runs over to stop him, and things get super wacky. It ends up with both of them falling into the river, both separately and together, no less than three times, before the drunken man thanks Charlie profusely for saving his life and then reveals that he's super rich and takes Charlie in his car and they go out to a swing dance club and Charlie does wacky dancing and then for a change of pace, falls and stuff.
By the time they get back to the rich man's house, it's daytime. Charlie drags the man to his front door while commenting that he likes the man's car. The man gives him the keys and says keep it. A butler answers the door and brings the old man while while shooing Charlie away. Just then, the blind girl with the flowers passes by. Charlie walks over to her, (need I say in a highly comic fashion?) and acts like a spaz etc.
Inside, the drunken old man asks the butler to go get "my friend". The butler reluctantly goes to the door and lets Charlie inside. Charlie asks the old man for money and the old man obliges, throwing a bunch of bills his way. Charlie runs back outside and buys all the flowers from the blind girl and then offers to drive her home.
And he does. And she's poor and has a grandma and shit. Charlie finds an eviction notice at her home and makes up his mind to pay her rent. He drives back the the rich man's house, but he's asleep and when Charlie (COMICALLY!) wakes him up, he doesn't remember Charlie, and kicks him out.
Then The Little Tramp gets a job as a sweeper-upper guy and does preposterous things and perhaps has a seizure and then gets fired and then sees an ad in the paper offering eye surgery and then decides he's going to pay for that too and then he becomes a boxer and this scene is really long where he boxes a dude and keeps hiding behind the ref and the ref gets punched instead and there is one funny part with the bell but whatever whatever whatever my eyes are literally glazing over. Yes, literally. I smashed a glazed doughnut into my eyes.
THEN--the rich man is drunk again and out in public, and stumbles upon Charlie. They drive around for awhile, then go back to the rich man's house and Charlie asks for a whole bunch more money and the rich man drunkenly gives it to him (and I guess they leave out the Little Tramp blow job scene) and then it turns out at the same time some criminals have broken in the house and are trying to rob the man. They knock out the rich man with a baton, but Charlie chases them out. The cops show up, along with the butler, and they think Charlie's the criminal and search him and find his BJ money. Charlie insists the rich man gave it to him, and they wake him up and of course he doesn't recognize Charlie, so Charlie runs away in a highly humorous fashion and the cops somehow can't catch him.
So he goes to the blind girl and gives him all the money he essentially conned from a drunkard, and she thanks him and gets the surgery. He's convinced she won't like him anymore once she realizes he's not rich (did I say she thought he was rich? Oh anyway, she thought he was rich) and he leaves.
Some time later, the blind girl is now just "the girl" and she's working at a flower shop talking to her grandma and wondering if she'll ever see the rich man who helped her.
Wouldn't you know it, Charlie shows up. She sees he's a beggar, and offers him a coin. He declines, but she insists, and grabs his hand. That's when she recognizes him.

You?

You can see now?

I can see now.

Ah, how sweet. Unfortunately, I can see, too. 

Review: Yikes. This is considered his best? I wasn't terribly a fan of Modern Times or The Gold Rush, but they were masterpieces compared to this one. This took all his worse qualities: unfunny "slapstick",  indulgent, pointless digressions, fakey and manipulative sentiment, and put them in a blender and served them up with a healthy dollop of redundancy. I've seen all this before in the other two movies, but better done, with a pathos that seemed genuine and intriguing, even if the "comedy" was still bad.  I wish Buster was on this list more instead. 

Stars: One out of five.

Next, the Final Ten:

10. The Wizard of Oz

9. Vertigo

8. Schindler's List

7. Lawrence of Arabia

6. Gone with the Wind

5. Singin' in the Rain

4. Raging Bull

3. Casablanca

2. The Godfather

1. Citizen Kane

Of the ten, I've seen only two: Godfather and Oz. Fingers crossed we've got ten five star movies up there.