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CITY LIGHTS 89
in spite of the futile attempts to make multilingual pictures.
The idea underlying the theme of every Chaplin film is easily comprehensible to anyone, irrespective of nationality, to a greater or lesser extent of understanding according to their sensitivity. This simplicity of appeal is more apparent in the love story of City Lights than in any of Chaplin's preceding pictures. And because the appeal is based quite logically on the fundamentals of the science of the cinema — movement expressed in terms of pictures set to a perfectly fitting accompaniment of musical sound — it is wider than that of the dialogue film with its limits of nationality. Moreover, City Lights possesses two qualities without which no film can be really successful— imagination and inventive power — both of which have been almost wholly absent from the cinema during its dialogue phase. For three years, at least ninetyfive per cent, of the world's film output has been concerned with the spoken word; it was left to Chaplin, the foremost director in America, to exert his influence and prove that the pursuit of speech was unnecessary. Undoubtedly City Lights will enjoy wide success, particularly because it is the work of Chaplin, but still more because it provides the relief from speech for which the majority of people have been waiting with such remarkable patience.
A slender thread of narrative usually supplies the story-interest of a Chaplin film, a simple theme drawn from the dozens which comprise the complexity of