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102 CELLULOID
cent, efficiency of organization which is the foundation of the American film industry. These pictures are calculated to make people in their millions rock with laughter, and there is little doubt that they succeed in this aim. They are played for a week or a month according to their worth, and then are forgotten, for they contain precious little to justify remembrance.
City Lights, on the other hand, is the work of three years' spasmodic but concentrated imaginative effort by a sensitive and exceptionally brilliant creative artist. Its humour is perfected by a hundred small touches that have taken many months to find their correct expression. Below its surface lies an age-old theme retold with fresh beauty and sentiment, a theme that has perhaps lain dormant in Chaplin's mind for many years and has now found its fulfilment. Into this film the man has put his last ounce of mental energy and probably the greater part of his financial earnings. It is the outcome of a single mind.
We all know which of these films deserves our unstinted admiration, but because we have paid to see each of them they are reduced to the same level. The laughter-making machines and the genius are both dependent for their existence upon a public of millions, a public which cannot differentiate between the superficiality of the one and the depth of the other while it laughs at them both. And yet it is beyond question that when in fifty years to come students make research into the development of the cinema, they will discover Chaplin in every reference, predominant then as he is now, whilst Keaton and Lloyd will have faded into oblivion.