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street-corner rendering of The Honeysuckle and the Bee had developed over the years into a skilled musician. Now, for three months, he laboured to learn the art of composing, so that he could write the music for City Lights himself. He became as absorbed in music as he normally was in film-making. He next took lessons in conducting, and himself conducted the orchestra which made the sound track.
Chaplin has always suffered doubts at the completion of any film, nearly always endured the dissatisfaction of the artist with the finished work, the horror of exposing that work to a possibly indifferent or hostile public. With City Lights this feeling was heightened by the fact that, at the climax of the triumph of talkies, he was intending to release a silent film. As always Sam Goldwyn received Chaplin's confession of dread — "You know, Sam, I've spent every penny I possess on City Lights. That first showing nearly killed me — it was an absolute Calvary. They're trying to force me to speak. But I will not. I will not! If City Lights is a failure, I believe it will strike a deeper blow than anything else that has ever happened to me in this life."
Sam, as always, understood and found the right consolation, and Sam was proved right again.
At the premiere in Los Angeles in March, 1931, a crowd of 25,000 people surged round the approaches to the cinema in order to see all Hollywood arrive. Large police forces had been mobilized to control the crowd. The whole cinema was floodlit, and the arrival of the stars was announced through loud speakers. At midnight, when the show was over, the crowd was still there, shouting itself hoarse, and yelling for Chaplin.
In London, similar scenes took place when it was shown at the Dominion. Hundreds packed into the vestibule, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Charlie, while thousands waited patiently outside in the pouring rain.
Within the building, Chaplin sat between Lady Astor and Bernard Shaw, watching the film that had suffered so many ills. It was balm to Chaplin's sick spirit to realize that his popularity was undiminished, and his work so greatly loved and admired that the public, excited to fever heat with the advent of talkies, would nevertheless receive his latest silent film with even greater excitement.
While he was in London this time, he visited the Hanwell Institution, where he had spent so unhappy a period as a child. The visit made a tremendous impact upon him, for he is, in his own words, "an emotional cuss". As he looked upon the children before him, a clear picture of the little boy Charlie no doubt came to his mind — the boy Charlie who once forfeited his Christmas orange and bag of sweets because, in his childish excitement over Christmas, he had forgotten