City Lights | Charlie Chaplin | Virginia Cherrill | DVD review | clown ministry | Reviews

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City Lights - The Chaplin Collection - Charlie Chaplin - Virginia Cherrill

City Lights, produced & directed by Charlie Chaplin. Starring Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia, Hank Mann

Synopsis of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights:

City Lights by Charlie Chaplin is one of Chaplin’s most famous films, and deservedly so. It is an excellent combination of comedy, satire and pathos. In it, Charlie portrays his world-famous tramp clown, who happens upon a blind flower girl, played extremely well by Virginia Cherrill, not realizing at first that she is blind, and then spending the remainder of the movie trying to raise enough money to pay for the operation to restore her sight.

It is hilarious, and contains some of Charlie Chaplin’s best routines, including Charlie Chaplin as a boxer, sanitation worker, etc. But the running joke throughout the film is the inebriated millionaire, played by Harry Myers. When drunk, the millionaire is the Tramp’s friend and benefactor, but when sober he remembers nothing about the Tramp at all.

Towards the end of the film, Charlie breaks the letter of the law to obtain the money for the girl -- and goes to prison for it. She has the operation and regains her sight, and doesn't see the Tramp until he is released from prison. Even then, at first she doesn't realize who the Tramp is -- she has been under the impression, while blind, that Charlie is well off -- but comes to the realization of who her benefactor truly is; the ending is a tearjerker, and must be seen. In short, I strongly recommend it.

Editorial Reviews of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (DVD version)

Courtesy of YouTube.com, the boxing match scene from Charlie Chaplin's 'City Lights' - one of the funniest moments in the movie

City Lights is a film to pick for the time capsule, a film that best represents the many aspects of director-writer-star Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his powers: Chaplin the actor, the sentimentalist, the knockabout clown, the ballet dancer, the athlete, the lover, the tragedian, the fool. It's all contained in Chaplin's simple story of a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill). Chaplin elevates the Victorian contrivances of the plot to something glorious with his inventive use of pantomime and his sure grasp of how the Tramp relates to the audience. In 1931, it was a gamble for Chaplin to stick with silence after talking pictures had killed off the art form that had made him famous, but audiences flocked to City Lights anyway. (Chaplin would not make his first full talking picture until 1940's The Great Dictator .) After all the superb comic sequences, the film culminates with one of the most moving scenes in the history of cinema, a luminous and heartbreaking fade-out that lifts the picture onto another plane. (Woody Allen paid homage to the scene at the end of Manhattan .) This is why the term "Chaplinesque" became a part of the language. --Robert Horton

City Lights, Charlie Chaplin Limited Edition
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Notes on Charlie Chaplin's City Lights:

This was Orson Welles' favorite movie of all time.
Charlie Chaplin reshot the scene in which the Little Tramp buys a flower from the blind flower-girl 342 times, as he could not find a satisfactory way of showing that the blind flower-girl thought that the mute tramp was wealthy.
Towards the end of filming, director Charlie Chaplin fired leading lady Virginia Cherill when she arrived late to shoot a scene. Chaplin then planned to reshoot all of Cherill's scenes using Georgia Hale, his leading lady from The Gold Rush (1925). He shot some of the end scenes using Hale, but soon realized the cost of reshooting all the scenes would bankrupt the movie, and so rehired Virginia Cherill... after she had negotiated a 100% pay rise.
The famous Flower Girl theme was written by José Padilla.
The original 1930 recording has been digitally re-recorded in Dolby Digital (Mono) for highest possible sound quality. The Dolby Digital recording of the score is available on the DVD version.
Charlie Chaplin faced extreme pressure to make City Lights as a talkie, but such was his popularity and power in Hollywood that Chaplin was able to complete and release City Lights as a silent (albeit with recorded music) at a time when the rest of the American motion picture industry had converted to sound.

I rate it 4 clowns on a 5-clown scale.