Chaplin's "Lights" still shines

Despite the apparent feelings of Cherrill's character's at the picture's close, the ambiguous, open-ended quality of the conclusion makes "City Lights" all the more attractive to a realist, too. Ambiguity is synonymous with existence itself--multiple meanings to a given experience. So little in life is cut and dried. Of course, besides appealing to realists, this element of hope also is alluring to romantics. However one "reads" the close to "City Lights," it demonstrates what New Yorker critic Anthony Lane calls the challenge Chaplin most relished--to "make an adventure out of a sermon." That is, the ending is not so much about lost love, but rather a sacrifice (getting the blind girl an operation whatever the result) that elevates the human condition.

Wes D. Gehring, Associate Mass Media Editor of USA Today, is professor of film, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., and author of Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography.

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