Blind lady and the tramp
What did you say, Charlie? I can’t hear you.
If silence was a religion, Charlie Chaplin would be Zeus.
By the early 1930s, talkies were the rave as moviegoers flocked to theaters to hear their favorite stars on the silver screen. Seriously, who wants to read text and figure out nonverbal communication at the movies? (Hmm, maybe that explains the state of our current society’s communication and literacy issues. But I digress.) Chaplin, though, had the power to grab audiences by the balls—the eyeballs, that is—and reel them into a story without using sound. He did that in 1931 with City Lights, an endearing story about Chaplin’s Tramp who falls in love with a blind and poor flower girl. The story, featuring drunken debacles, stints in jail, ass kicking and medical miracles serenaded by classic silent-film music, was an enormous success—even Albert Einstein showed up at the Hollywood premiere. Maybe we can silence some current movie stars in upcoming films? Ah, wishful thinking.
