The story behind “City Lights” and cinema’s greatest final shot of all time

Simply the best?

There are, of course, many competing claimants to the title of greatest final shot in cinematic history. Seeing the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, slow realization in The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s freeze frame, a door slamming in The Godfather, and Norma Desmond asking for her close-up on Sunset Boulevard are all worth mentioning. But none of them have been repeated to the same extent as City Lights’ last-minute finale.

Films as diverse as The 400 Blows, This Is England, Gone Girl, and Moonlight owe Chaplin a debt, each ending with characters staring into the camera. Many films have been more explicit with their tributes. Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) ends with his character smiling wistfully at his young friend Tracy, after confirming that she is going to London for six months. A year later, in The Long Good Friday, director John Mackenzie focused on gangster Bob Hoskins who goes through a variety of emotions in quick succession when he realizes that he has been captured by IRA assassins and will be killed.

Until the end of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. She tips her moving hat to City Lights. Instead of showing Sully meeting Boo, after the pair seemingly separated forever when the portal to her bedroom was destroyed, we just see him open her door, look around, and hear Boo say, “Kitty!” And he smiles.

Scientific

As is often the case, brevity makes these moments all the more powerful. But it still takes hours of creativity, skill and talent – as well as thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars – to put these scenes on celluloid. This was especially true of “City Lights”. Not only was it Chaplin’s most expensive film – its production costs were $1.5 million (about $30 million or £22 million today) – but he spent years crafting the story and shooting it, hoping it would live up to the enormous expectations his works met.