The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charlie Chaplin · a film · 1931 · about 87 minutes · silent, with intertitles and a synchronised score by Chaplin
Mode
Silent comedy carrying the weight of melodrama; slapstick and pathos under one law, and a fable of money told without speech
Mythos
The healing of the blind, bought; the recognition by touch; the poor man taken for a prince; the holy fool who gives everything; the rich man who is two men
Phase
Some months in one city, from the unveiling of a monument to a flower shop after a prison term, in nine movements
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 87 minutes, with intertitles and a synchronised recorded score and sound effects; no spoken dialogue; five principal roles
Register
From the squawk of civic speeches and a ballet in a boxing ring to a face held over a rose; delight and pathos at the same pitch
Scale
A tramp, a flower girl, a millionaire, one city
Governing Proposition
A tramp is taken for a rich man by a blind flower girl and for a friend by a millionaire who knows him only when drunk, and he gives everything so that she can see. The wager of the film is that in a city of money a man is seen according to what he seems to have, and that a film without voices, in which no one can be known by speech, can end on the one recognition left to it: a hand.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a ceremony. A crowd has gathered for the unveiling of a monument, “Peace and Prosperity”, and dignitaries address it. Their speeches are heard as squawking, a noise in the shape of speech. Then the veil is drawn off, and asleep in the lap of the statue lies the Tramp. His trousers are caught on its sword. What the city sets up to display is pulled back to show a ragged man who has done nothing wrong, and the crowd laughs.
Charles Chaplin wrote, produced and directed the film, plays the Tramp, and composed its score. Work began at the end of 1927 or early in 1928, ran with long stoppages, and finished in late 1930, so that a picture begun as sound arrived was completed when the industry had converted. It is a silent picture with intertitles, released with a synchronised recorded score and sound effects and no spoken dialogue. Roland Totheroh photographed it, with Gordon Pollock and Mark Marlatt; the music was arranged by Arthur Johnston and conducted by Alfred Newman. United Artists released it, and it premiered at the Los Angeles Theater on 30 January 1931 before opening in New York in February. Chaplin paid for it himself.
The opening states the film’s argument in its first minute. Public speech is noise; what matters will be shown. It also states its law. The film is built in nine movements, from this unveiling to another at the end, and between them a man is uncovered again and again, by a girl who cannot see him, by a rich man who cannot remember him, and by the police, and each time he is seen as something he is not.
Movement II
On a street corner the Tramp meets a flower girl, played by Virginia Cherrill. She is blind. At the sound of a car door she takes him for a rich man, and holds out a flower. Her hand finds his lapel. The scene is played almost without movement, under José Padilla’s “La Violetera”, which becomes her theme, and it is the first height of the film: stillness, a hand, a flower.
The misrecognition is founded on a sound, in a film in which no one speaks. She cannot see the clothes, so she reads the car door, and from that moment he is for her a gentleman. She lives with her grandmother, played by Florence Lee, and the rent is owing, and her blindness, which is the condition of her love, is also what she most needs to be rid of.
The audience sees everything the girl cannot. It sees the rags, and it sees the rich man she sees in her mind. The whole film is played as the sight she lacks. That is the form’s first move, and the last scene will close it, when her sight and the audience’s meet on one face.
Movement III
At night on the embankment the Tramp stops a drunk millionaire, played by Harry Myers, from drowning himself. A stone ends tied round two necks: dread played as farce. Saved, the millionaire takes the Tramp for his friend and brings him into his household, where there is a butler, played by Allan Garcia.
There follow the party and the nightclub, and with them the comedy kept for itself. The Tramp swallows a whistle. There is the business of the spaghetti and the streamer. The nightclub stages an apache dance, and the millionaire’s car becomes a running business of its own. These are the film’s set pieces, perfectly timed and loosely bound: they are permitted by the night more than required by it.
In the morning the millionaire is sober and does not know him. The friend of the night is a stranger at breakfast. The pattern repeats: drunk, the rich man is his friend, and with the Rolls-Royce and the rich man’s money the Tramp buys the girl’s flowers; sober, the rich man forgets. Friendship and forgetting are one condition, and the film shows it as the law of money, warm at night and cold by day.
Movement IV
The girl and her grandmother receive notice of eviction. The Tramp, who has been her rich man, tries to earn the rent. He takes a job sweeping the streets and loses it. Each attempt is honest, and each fails, and the film counts the failures carefully, because they are the reason he will have to take what he cannot earn.
He agrees to a boxing match, against an opponent played by Hank Mann. The fight is the summit of the film’s comedy: a ballet of hiding behind the referee, timed to the bell, the body inventing one escape after another until comedy rises into pure invention of movement. It is required in kind, another honest try at the money, and longer than its work. He loses.
The millionaire, drunk again, gives him a thousand dollars for the girl’s rent and for an operation on her eyes. Burglars are in the house; the millionaire, sober, does not remember the gift, and the police take the Tramp for a thief. The money reaches the girl, and the Tramp is arrested. The healing of the blind, the oldest of miracles, is bought, and the price is prison.
Movement V
Months later he is released from prison, ragged. The girl can see now, and she has a flower shop. Outside it he picks a flower from the gutter. She sees a ragged man, laughs at him, and offers him a coin and a flower.
She presses the coin into his hand, and her fingers know the hand. The intertitle is a single word: “You?” The last exchange turns on her sight: she can see now. The camera holds her face and his, the Tramp over the rose in close-up, half shame and half joy, held. The scene is the film’s height.
Nothing is settled. Gratitude and recognition do not answer whether love survives seeing, whether she will accept the man she now sees, or whether he should have hidden. The film ends on the faces. The first unveiling showed a ragged man to a city that laughed; the last shows him to the one person who had loved him without seeing him, and the film, which has told its story without voices, ends at the moment when a voice would have told her nothing and a hand told her everything.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The spine is a double misrecognition, and it is strictly built. The girl takes the Tramp for rich because she cannot see; the millionaire knows him as a friend only when drunk; and each blindness needs the other, since the money her eyes need can come only from the man who forgets where it came from. The eviction notice, the sweeping job and the fight are required: each is an honest attempt to earn what will finally be given, and each failure is why he must take the gift and be arrested. The ending is required by the first meeting. What gives is the set piece kept for itself: the swallowed whistle, the spaghetti and the streamer, the apache dance, the repeated business of the millionaire’s car. The boxing match is required in kind and longer than its work. The episodes are compelled in order and permitted in length.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a society of money a man is seen according to what he seems to have, and only the blind and the drunk see the man. The millionaire is fellowship as intoxication, warm at night and cold at breakfast, and the film shows the rich man’s friendship and the rich man’s forgetting as one condition. The harder truth is the ending’s. Her sight restored, the girl laughs at a ragged man and offers him a coin and a flower; she knows him by the touch of his hand, and the last close-ups hold both faces without saying what follows. Gratitude and recognition do not settle whether love survives seeing, and the film will not say. All of it is disclosed in image. Held below the top because the social half is a fable mechanism, its millionaire schematic, and the city’s poor are a type more than a society.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of more than one kind. The first meeting: the car door, the flower held out, the girl’s hand finding his lapel, played almost without movement under “La Violetera”. The embankment at night, a stone tied round two necks, dread played as farce. The boxing match, a ballet of hiding behind the referee, rising past comedy into pure invention of the body. The summit is the last scene: the flower picked from the gutter, the coin pressed into his hand, her fingers recognising the hand, and his face over the rose, half shame and half joy, held. It stands among the great single moments of the medium. Held below the top because much of the elevation between the summits is delight rather than transport, and the comedy, however high, is a different kind of height.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the structure. The healing of the blind, the oldest miracle, is here bought for a thousand dollars and paid for with prison. The recognition by touch is the recognition scene of the oldest stories, Eurycleia’s hand on the scar of Odysseus, made the last act of the film. The poor man taken for a prince is Cinderella reversed, and the beggar who gives everything is the holy fool. The millionaire is a double figure, one man as two, generous and drunk, cold and sober. The Tramp, built across fifteen years of films, carries here his fullest load: the outcast as the one figure who loves without being seen. The particular stays particular: a flower, a whistle, a hand. Held below the top because the archetypes are many and gathered rather than wholly fused, and the millionaire’s is mechanical.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is Chaplin’s own silent comedy, the sentimental melodrama in which the blind flower girl is a stock figure, and the mixture of slapstick and pathos he had already made in The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928). The stake was very large: begun as sound arrived and finished when the industry had converted, made with his own money over nearly three years, a silent feature released into a talking cinema. The opening mocks speech itself, the dignitaries’ addresses rendered as squawking. The departures are real: pathos carried to a weight no comedy had carried, and an ending that stops on a question. But the swerve is of degree, on a proven path, and the great wager was to keep a form rather than to turn from it. Refusal is a stake, not a departure, and the axis scores the two together: a large stake and a small turn.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film can no longer say what it knows. A blind girl and a man known by touch, told in a cinema without voices: had the film spoken, she would know him by his voice in the shop, and the ending could not exist. Silence is the condition of the misrecognition and of the recognition both. The audience, which sees everything, is set against the girl, who sees nothing, and the whole film is played as the sight she lacks, until her sight and ours meet on one face. The score, Chaplin’s own, takes the place of speech and of feeling stated. The opening, in which public speech is noise, declares the form’s argument. Held below the top because the episodic body of the film, the party, the nightclub and the car, is a container for comedy, used rather than formed: a different set of gags would know the same.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Ninety-five years of return are evidence. The ending has a literature of its own, and its question stays open: whether she accepts him, whether he should have hidden, whether the close is happy, cruel or neither. The film has been read as a fable of class, as Chaplin’s answer to sound, and as a film about looking, in which the audience is the one who sees. Formally the rhymes repay return: the monument unveiled at the start and the Tramp unveiled to the girl at the end; the flower given and the flower given back. Held at its figure because the comedy, perfect as it is, does not open further on return, and much of what has been written turns to the ending and to the making rather than to new meanings.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1930s, and it was moving away from this film’s form. The intrinsic force is great: proof that pantomime and a recorded score could hold a feature against speech, and the fullest fusion of comedy and pathos the medium had then made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and narrow. The film did not redirect the field. The talkie won, and the silent feature did not return beyond Chaplin’s own Modern Times (1936), at 8.3, and a few later exercises. Its reach runs through endings and through the comic tradition: the close that stops on a face, and the clown as a figure of grace, which Fellini’s La Strada (8.3) and Nights of Cabiria (7.7) take from Chaplin. Much of what is credited to it belongs to the Tramp and to Chaplin’s work as a whole, and is discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across ninety-five years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, picture and synchronised score together, in its one version, and the restorations repair it. Presence has been continuous and wide, on the widest scale a silent film has had: revival and reissue from 1950, television, every home format, teaching, live screenings with orchestra, and the Tramp as one of the most recognised figures of the century. The surface of 1931 is a city of the Depression, and the film is about that city, so it ages as period rather than as fashion. The fabric is the monochrome and synchronised sound of its year, the smallest charge. Survival on film can stand no higher than 8.8, and the evidence reaches it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts. The performance is the making, and at its height it is as exact as anything the medium holds: the boxing match, timed to the bell as a dance; the swallowed whistle; the stillness of the first meeting; the last close-up. Chaplin’s direction of the action, the timing of every gag to the cut and to the music, and his score, which carries the film without words, bear weight throughout. The costs are real, and they fall on the image. The camera is functional, set square to the action and seldom doing more than record it; Roland Totheroh’s photography is plain; the street is a studio set and looks it; and Virginia Cherrill’s performance is limited until the last scene, where it is exact. The score is at times sweeter than the images need. Held below the top because the command is concentrated in the body and the timing, not in every department.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening farce, the Tramp asleep in the lap of a civic statue, his trousers caught on its sword, and the last close-up. One law governs both: an unveiling, in which what the city displays is drawn back to show a ragged man, laughed at, who has done nothing wrong. Between them the same law holds. The girl unveils him in her mind as rich, the millionaire unveils him to his household and forgets him, and the police unveil him as a thief. Slapstick and pathos obey one physics, because the body’s comedy is always the comedy of being misseen. The range is wide, and it holds. The strain is in the millionaire’s amnesia, a device that runs on a farce’s rules rather than the film’s, and in the nightclub business, a music-hall routine at the edge of the law.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 87 minutes holds. The orders: consciousness, the Tramp’s, given by the body, and the girl’s, given by her blindness; love; wealth and poverty as the city’s law; labour, in flower-selling, street-sweeping and paid fighting; the household economy, in the rent and the eviction notice; the law, in the police and the prison; medicine, in an operation that can be bought; the civic state, in the monument and its speeches. Money integrates them: the rent, the fight, the gift and the arrest are one movement. What holds the axis lowest: the family is a grandmother; history is the Depression held as background; the sacred is absent but for the shape of the healing; nature is absent; and the girl’s inner life is given almost wholly from outside. It is a fable’s scope, carried far.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.8, then The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Inner Law at 8.7. A form in which silence is the condition of the misrecognition and of the recognition both; a survival whole and continuous over ninety-five years; a making whose command lies in the body, the timing and the score; and one law, the unveiling of a ragged man, from the monument to the last close-up.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: a fable’s scope, in which money integrates love, labour, the law and the city, while the family is a grandmother, history a background, nature absent and the girl’s inner life given from outside. Above it, The Inevitable, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: set pieces permitted in length, a great stake taken to keep a form rather than to turn from it, and a reach that the talkie closed in the main line.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 each fall three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.5 from a sum of 101.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of City Lights as released in 1931, about 87 minutes, a silent picture with English intertitles and a synchronised recorded score and sound effects, with no spoken dialogue, from the unveiling of the monument to the last close-up: written, produced and directed by Charles Chaplin, who plays the Tramp and composed the score, released by United Artists, photographed by Roland Totheroh with Gordon Pollock and Mark Marlatt, the music arranged by Arthur Johnston and conducted by Alfred Newman, with Virginia Cherrill, Harry Myers, Florence Lee, Allan Garcia and Hank Mann. The film is judged as released in 1931. Later restorations, among them the Bologna restoration, repair it and are not a different cut; the reissues from 1950 on are not judged as separate versions. No print, script or title list was consulted. Intertitles are quoted only where their words are certain; the last exchange is described rather than quoted. Claims that could not be verified, among them the editing credit, the date of a later reconstruction of the score for live performance, an account of the casting during production, the film’s distribution in the 1950s and 1960s, judgments of the last scene attributed to named critics, and particular later films said to echo its ending, are not given.