The story behind City Lights and cinema’s greatest ever final shot

Simply the best?

There are, of course, many rival claimants to the title of the greatest final shot in cinema history. Planet of the Apes’ Statue of Liberty sighting, the slow realisation in The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s freeze-frame finish, the door closing in The Godfather, and Norma Desmond asking for her close-up in Sunset Boulevard each deserve a mention. But none of these has been replicated quite as often as City Lights’ final moment.

Films as diverse as The 400 Blows, This Is England, Gone Girl, and Moonlight owe Chaplin a debt, as they each end with characters staring down the camera. Several films have been much more overt with their homages. Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) ends with his character ruefully smiling at his young girlfriend Tracy, after she confirms she’s going to London for six months. A year later, in The Long Good Friday, director John Mackenzie focused on Bob Hoskins’ gangster going through a variety of emotions in quick succession as he realises he’s been caught by IRA assassins and is going to be killed. 

Even the end of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. tips its animated hat to City Lights. Rather than showing Sulley’s reunion with Boo, after the pair were seemingly separated forever when the portal into her bedroom was destroyed, we just see him opening her door, looking around, hearing Boo say, “Kitty!” and smiling.

Alamy

As is so often the case, brevity makes these moments even more powerful. But it still takes hours of creativity, skill, and talent – as well as thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars – to put these scenes on celluloid. That was especially true of City Lights. Not only was it Chaplin’s most expensive film – with production costs of $1.5m (around $30m or £22m today) – but he spent years crafting the story, shooting it, and hoping it would live up to immense expectations that met his work.