- This article refers to the Charlie Chaplin film. For other uses, see City Lights (disambiguation).
| City Lights |
theatrical poster |
| Directed by |
Charlie Chaplin |
| Produced by |
Charlie Chaplin (uncredited) |
| Written by |
Charlie Chaplin |
| Starring |
Charlie Chaplin
Virginia Cherrill
Florence Lee
Harry Myers |
| Music by |
Charlie Chaplin |
| Cinematography |
Rollie Totheroh
Gordon Pollock
Mark Marklatt (uncredited) |
| Editing by |
Charlie Chaplin (uncredited) |
| Distributed by |
United Artists |
| Release date(s) |
January 30, 1931 (US) |
| Running time |
87 minutes |
| Country |
United States |
| Language |
English (original title cards) |
| Budget |
$1,500,000 (est.) |
City Lights is a 1931 American silent romantic comedy-drama film starring, written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. It also stars Virginia Cherrill and Harry Myers. Despite the fact that the production of silent films had dwindled with the rise of "talking" pictures City Lights was immediately popular and is today remembered as one of the highest accomplishments of Chaplin's prolific career. Although classified as a comedy, City Lights has an ending widely regarded as the finest and most moving in cinema history.
Plot
The plot centers around Chaplin's tramp, broke and homeless he runs into a drunken millionaire and talks him out of committing suicide. A running gag throughout the film is that when the millionaire is drunk he is the best of friends with the tramp right up until he sobers up and cannot remember him. The millionaire takes to the tramp as his "best friend for life," giving him nice clothes, going to parties and even giving him his Rolls Royce. The tramp meets a poor blind girl whom he sees selling flowers on the street. He falls in love with her and when the girl mistakes him for a millionaire he keeps up the charade.
To keep up the illusion that he is wealthy while the millionaire is traveling abroad in Europe, he gets a job as a street sweeper. The tramp learns that the girl's rent is overdue and she and her grandmother are in danger of being evicted from their apartment. However the Tramp must find a way to raise the $22 overnight after losing his sweeping job. In one of the fuunest and most memorable scenes he enters a boxing contest to raise money for the girl, which also fails. Eventually it is a casual gift of one thousand dollars from the returning millionaire which will pay for not only the rent but also an operation for the girl's eyes the Tramp read about in the paper. Unfortunately like many of the tramp's efforts things go wrong and he is mistakenly accused of stealing the money when the millionaire is sober. The tramp manages to get the money to the girl, telling her that he is going away shortly before he is arrested and imprisoned.
Several months later, the tramp has been released, and, searching for the little flower girl, he goes back to the street corner where he first saw her, but she isn't there..he goes further into the city, next to where the flower girl, with her sight restored, has opened up a flower shop with her grandmother. Every time a rich man comes into the shop the girl wonders if he was her mysterious benefactor. When the tramp sees a flower lying in the gutter he bends over to pick it up and is kicked in the seat of his pants by two schoolboys. The girl laughs and when the tramp turns around he sees her through the store window, he stares in disbelief and joy. The girl jokes to her co-worker that she has "made a conquest." Seeing the flower fall apart in his hand, the girl offers him one of her flowers and a coin. The tramp begins to scurry away then stops and slowly reaches for the flower. The girl then takes hold of his hand and places the coin in. But, in a wonderfully under-played final scene, when she feels his hand, she slowly and beautifully realizes who he is... "You?" she says, and he nervously nods, asking, "You can see now?" She squeezes his hand and whispers, "Yes, I can see now," holding back her tears and appearing uncertain as to how she feels or what to do, as the film closes and fades on Chaplin's emotional smile of love and achievement.
Cast
Production
Chaplin's feature The Circus, released in 1928, was his last film before the motion picture embraced sound recording, thus bringing the silent movie era to a close. Since he operated as his own producer and distributor (as the part owner of United Artists), he was able to conceive City Lights as a silent film. However, the film was technically not a fully silent film. Although dialogue was presented on intertitles, the film's soundtrack had synchronized music, sound effects, and some unintelligible sounds that mocked speech patterns.[1]
As a filmmaker, 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 leading lady 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. (Approximately seven minutes of test footage of Hale survives and is included on the DVD release; excerpts were first seen in the documentary Unknown Chaplin along with an unused opening sequence from the film.) By the time the film was completed, silent films were unpopular. However, it was one of the great financial and artistic successes of Chaplin's career, and remained his own personal favorite of all his films. He was especially fond of the final scene, commenting:
[I]n City Lights just the last scene … I’m not acting …. Almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking … It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful, and because it isn’t over-acted.[2]
Reception
Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in
City Lights.
Chaplin was exceptionally nervous about the reception of the film just prior to its release in 1931. Silent films were a total anachronism by this time, with Hollywood having completely switched to sound films by the end of 1929. However, the film was enthusiastically received by Great Depression era audiences, and was one of Chaplin's most financially successful and critically acclaimed releases. At the gala Hollywood premiere, Chaplin's special guests were Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that he knew the film would be a success after watching the Einsteins' reactions.[citation needed] The film was theatrically re-released in 1950.[3]
Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles said it was his favorite film. In 1963, the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick what he felt were the top-ten films; he listed City Lights as his fifth.[4] In 1972, renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky was asked to list his ten favorite films and also placed City Lights at number five 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." The great George Bernard Shaw, having in mind the peerless quality of Chaplin's work and that he performed virtually every role in creating his films - actor, director, producer, scriptwriter, musical scores etc., called Chaplin "the only genius to come out of the movie industry". Celebrated Italian director Federico Fellini has often praised this film and his Nights of Cabiria makes quotations from it. In the 2003 documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen said it was Chaplin's best picture. Allen is said to have based the final scene of his 1979 film Manhattan on the final scene of City Lights. Of the final scene, critic James Agee wrote in Life magazine in 1949 that it was the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid."[citation needed]
In 1992, City Lights was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2007, the American Film Institute's tenth anniversary edition of "100 Years...100 Movies" named City Lights the eleventh greatest American film of all time (a dramatic change from its original standing of 76), making it the highest ranking silent film.[citation needed]
In the first Sight and Sound film magazine poll of the ten best films of all time in 1952, City Lights was voted the second best film of all time, bested only by Vittorio DeSica's Bicycle Thieves.[5] Though it has not reappeared on subsequent lists (voted on by select critics every ten years) City Lights did receive five votes in the 2002 poll, making its ranking 45th.[6] In 2002, Sight and Sound also polled directors as well as critics; in this poll the film received eight votes and was ranked overall as 19th.[7]
In June 2008, AFI revealed its "ten top ten", the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres, after polling over 1500 people from the creative community. City Lights was acknowledged as the best film in the romantic comedy genre.[8]
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? (first chapter in Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out).
See also
Notes
External links
