City Lights
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- This article refers to the Charlie Chaplin film. For the San Francisco bookstore see City Lights Bookstore. For the Glasgwegian sitcom see City Lights (sitcom). For rocker Lou Reed's 1985 compilation album see City Lights (album).
The Circus, released in 1928, was Chaplin's last film to debut before motion pictures with sound (known as "talkies" at the time) took over. Since The Circus, sound pictures quickly took over as the industry standard. It was not uncommon for silent actors to oppose the arrival of talking pictures. Had Chaplin been anybody else, he probably would not have been able to shoot City Lights as a silent film, but because of his power in Hollywood, and because he had almost complete control over his work, he was able to make this film silent (except for music, a few sparse sound effects, and some unintelligble sounds that mock speech). Dialogue is presented with title cards.
Charlie Chaplin was known for being a perfectionist; he was famous for doing many more takes than other directors at the time. At one point he actually fired Virginia Cherrill and began re-filming with Georgia Hale, Chaplin's co-star in The Gold Rush. This proved too expensive, even for his budget, and so he later re-hired Cherrill and was able to finish City Lights.
Plot
The plot concerns Chaplin's Tramp, broke and homeless, meeting a poor blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) selling flowers on the streets and falling in love with her. The blind girl mistakes him for a millionaire. Since he wants to help her and doesn't want to disappoint her, he keeps up the charade. He befriends a drunk millionaire, works small jobs like street sweeping, and enters a boxing contest, all to raise money for an operation to restore her sight.
In the end, it a is a casual gift of a thousand dollars from his drunken millionaire friend that eventually will pay for the operation that restores the blind girl's sight. Unfortunately, like many of the Tramp's efforts, things go wrong and he is mistakenly accused of stealing the money. He ends up spending some months in jail, but not before getting the money to the blind girl.
The ending, widely acclaimed as one of cinema's most touching, brings the flower girl, her sight restored, face to face with her kind benefactor. "You?" she says after recognizing the touch of his hand. "Yes" replies the nervous tramp, his face a map of shame, pride, love and devotion.
This ending has been mimicked in Manhattan, Magnolia, and La Dolce Vita.
Reception
Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles has been quoted as saying that this is his favorite movie of all time. In 1963, the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick what he felt were the top-ten films; he listed City Lights at number 5. In 1972, renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky was asked to list his 10 favorite films and placed "City Lights" at number 5 whilst expressing his admiration for the director, "Chaplin is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of a doubt. The films he left behind can never grow old." In the 2003 documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen said it was Chaplin's best picture. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
French experimental musician and film critic Michel Chion has written an analysis of City Lights, published as Les Lumières de la ville. Slavoj Žižek also used the film as a primary example in one of his essays on Jacques Lacan, Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?.
Poster gallery
See also
| The Films of Charlie Chaplin | |
|---|---|
| The Chaplin-Mutual Comedies: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond, One A.M., The Count, The Pawnshop, Behind the Screen, The Rink, Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant, The Adventurer | |
| Feature-length films: Tillie's Punctured Romance, The Kid, A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, A King in New York, A Countess from Hong Kong | |
| Other films: The New Janitor, Chaplin | |
| Stock company: Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Albert Austin, Henry Bergman | |
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