It seems appropriate that Film Forum is observing the 30th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s death this month by showing the great filmmaker at his liveliest. Starting December 25, a brand-new print of “City Lights” will get a one-week engagement. The 1931 masterpiece — a “comedy romance in pantomime,” as the title card reads — has the Little Tramp getting in trouble all over town with all sorts of people, notably a beautiful, blind flower vendor (identified in the credits as “a blind girl”) played by Virginia Cherrill. Perhaps more than any other Chaplin film, “City Lights” was shaped by its creator’s manic perfectionism. For nearly three years, Chaplin choreographed its physical routines down to the last detail and nearly tore his hair out trying to get the story to make sense.

Filming began in 1928, and snafus swarmed like locusts. Casting troubles and conceptual hang-ups led to numerous re-shoots, which led to more casting troubles. Two actors playing newsboys had to be replaced during the shoot because they’d grown up. The first actor hired to play the blowsy millionaire who befriends the Little Tramp couldn’t deal with a farcical suicide-rescue scene that required him to leap repeatedly in and out of the water; Chaplin, who overcame his own aquatic aversions to make the scene happen, had him fired.

The character of the blind love interest, though, presented the most problems: The plot hinged on her mistaking her hobo suitor for a high roller, but Chaplin struggled to dream up just how this should happen. In the end, he decided to have the Little Tramp elude a policeman by entering and then exiting a limousine parked next to her. She hears the door click, and the driver departs at just the right moment. The mutual dislike shared by Chaplin and his starlet plagued that scene in particular. At one point, Chaplin replaced Cherrill — who would later become Cary Grant’s first wife — with Georgia Hale, his leading lady from “The Gold Rush.” When she didn’t work out, Cherrill was brought back to the set.

Chaplin’s demanding methods, however, were inseparable from his genius. “Instead of writing it down, he’d use celluloid as his notebook,” the film historian Kevin Brownlow said. “He would keep going and going until it began to work — 30 to 50 takes was nothing.”

One of the greatest triumphs of Chaplin’s exactitude in “City Lights” is the unforgettable boxing match, an ingenious mix of puppetry and pas de trois (the ref gets involved) that surely ranks as one of the funniest scenes in cinema history. It goes without saying that the scene remains as effective today as it was 75 years ago. Mr. Brownlow recalled seeing it play before a London audience in 1989. “The audience laughed so much you couldn’t hear the orchestra,” he said.

Ironically, Chaplin feared they would hate every minute of it. “He was convinced it wasn’t funny,” Mr. Brownlow, who has written and directed two Chaplin documentaries, “Unknown Chaplin” and “The Tramp and the Dictator,” said of the film. Chaplin’s mischievous friend, the swashbuckling star Douglas Fairbanks, hardly helped matters. At a preview arranged by Fairbanks, Chaplin, arriving late, nervously stood in the back. To his great dismay, he didn’t hear a single chuckle. A full panic had seized him by the time the lights came up — to reveal a room full of mannequins. It is safe to assume that the crowd at Film Forum will respond quite differently.

“City Lights” begins a one-week engagement on December 25 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).