Movie-A-Day #405: City Lights

[Chaplin]

You must be registered for see images attach

Amazon.com essential video
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

---------------------------

Ending my week with one of my favorite movies and one that is considered one of the greatest and most poignant comedies of all time.

I had already seen Modern Times and The Gold Rush when I saw City Lights, and like those other movies, I was blown away by the skill involved and how easily Chaplin made the audience believe in him. This is a silent movie, which means that the audience (especially on this board) is tiny, but it is definitely worth the attempt to sit down and watch it. I like to think that silent movies are the apex of storytelling because everything they showed hadn't happened before. Unlike today, where even the most original stuff borrows from other movies.

I can't recommend this enough, even to people who are convinced they could never watch a silent movie.

 

[Bada0Bing]

I just watched it. Fantastic movie. I don’t really like silent movies, but I can watch one every once in a while. I had previously read that the ending is amazing and one of the most famous of all-time. It definitely didn’t disappoint, it was very heartwarming.

I found some interesting trivia items at IMDB.

Charles Chaplin re-shot 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.

When the film opened on 31 January 1931, Albert Einstein joined Chaplin at the theater.