Everything about City Lights totally explained
» This article refers to the Charlie Chaplin film. For other uses, see City Lights (disambiguation)
City Lights is a
1931 English language film written by, directed by and starring
Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin also composed the musical score which comprised the majority of the film's sound, since there's no dialogue in the picture.
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 wasn't uncommon for silent actors to oppose the arrival of talking pictures. Had Chaplin been anybody else, he probably wouldn't have been able to shoot
City Lights as a
silent film, but because of his power in Hollywood, and because he'd complete artistic and financial control over his work, he was able to make this film silent (except for music, sound effects, and some unintelligible 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. (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 last scene. He commented:
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 and, because he doesn't want to disappoint her, he keeps up the charade. He later saves a millionaire from committing suicide and a running gag throughout the film is when the millionaire is drunk he's the best of friends with the tramp right until he sobers up and can't remember him. Meanwhile the tramp works small jobs such as street sweeping and enters a boxing contest, all to raise money for an operation to restore the girl's sight.
In the end it's a casual gift of a thousand dollars from his drunken millionaire friend that eventually will pay for the operation. Unfortunately like many of the tramp's efforts things go wrong and he's mistakenly accused of stealing the money when the millionaire sobers up. The tramp manages to get the money to the girl, telling her that he's going away shortly before he's arrested and sent to jail for several months.
The ending is widely acclaimed as one of cinema's most touching; released, the tramp ends up on the same street corner where the flower girl, 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 this is her mysterious benefactor. The tramp spots a flower in the gutter and as he goes to pick it up is humiliated by two boys as the girl laughs at him. He turns around, sees her, and stops. The girl jokes to her grandmother that she's "made a conquest". Seeing the flower fall apart in his hand, she hands him one of her flowers and a coin, but when she feels his hand, she realizes that it's familiar. "You?" she says, and he nervously nods, asking, "You can see now?" She replies, "Yes, I can see now." The film ends with a close up of the tramp and the music continues to swell for some time after the shot fades to black.
This ending has been mimicked in numerous films including
Manhattan,
Magnolia and
La dolce vita.
Cast
Reception
Several well-known directors have praised
City Lights. 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." 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 1978 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".
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 (in the
original list the AFI ranked the film 76th), making it both the highest ranking silent film and comedy.
For the first
Sight and Sound 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 DeSica's
Bicycle Thieves. Though it hasn't 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. In the first ever
Sight and Sound poll of directors in 2002,
City Lights received 8 votes, giving it an overall ranking of 19th.
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?.
Rock singer-songwriter Lou Reed wrote a tribute to Chaplin called "City Lights" on his 1979 album
The Bells.
Poster gallery
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Further Information
Get more info on 'City Lights'.
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