In 1931, they release Pardon Us as their first full-length feature.
In 1931, Chaplin releases City Lights.
The premiere is held at the Los Angeles Theater, the first time such a screening has taken place downtown instead of in Hollywood. Dr. and Frau Albert Einstein, and Dr. and Mrs. Robert A. Millikan, accompany Chaplin.
Two Nobel prize-winning physicists and their wives.
These are the circles in which Chaplin now moves.
On his arm Chaplin has Georgia Hale, who almost starred in The Circus, and almost starred in City Lights too. Chaplin has been fucking Georgia Hale since The Gold Rush, and makes her alternately happy and miserable according to the cycles of the moon and the ebb and flow of his humors.
He wonders how Georgia Hale feels as she watches Chaplin’s camera venerate Virginia Cherrill in City Lights, as she rues that this role was once, however briefly, hers, until Chaplin realized that Virginia Cherrill was more worthy of it than she.
At least, he thinks, Georgia Hale can console herself with the knowledge that Chaplin did not fuck Virginia Cherrill, however beautiful she may be. This lapse on Chaplin’s part is common knowledge around town. The reasons for Chaplin’s failure remain unclear, although they probably boil down to a simple absence of sexual attraction on both sides.
Even Chaplin needs to feel something.
But he believes that the fact Chaplin did not sleep with Virginia Cherrill may have contributed to the genius of City Lights. He finds in it a beauty, a purity. It is, be believes, Chaplin’s masterpiece, and he sheds tears at the end because it is so gentle, so perfect, so true.
Yet even as he leaves the theater, head low, he thinks:
I could not have made City Lights, but nor would I want to have made City Lights.
It is art, but it is not comedy.