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4.1 American Film Institute Recognition

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City Lights Wiki Information

This article refers to the Charlie Chaplin film. For other uses, see City Lights (disambiguation).

City Lights is a 1931 American silent romantic comedy 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.

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Plot

The plot centers around Chaplin's Tramp, broke and homeless, and a poor blind girl whom the tramp 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. Earlier in the film he had talked a drunken millionaire out of committing suicide and 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 tramp learns that the girl's rent is overdue and she and her grandmother are in danger of being evicted from their apartment. He begins working small jobs such as street sweeping and in a memorable scene enters a boxing contest, all to raise money for the girl. Eventually it is a casual gift of one thousand dollars from the millionaire which will pay for not only the rent but also an operation for the girl's eyes. 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 ends up on the same 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 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 approaches her to give her the flower she jokes to her grandmother that she has "made a conquest." Seeing the flower fall apart in his hand, the girl hands him one of her flowers, but when she feels his hand, she realizes that it is familiar. "You?" she says, and he nervously nods, then asks, "You can see now?" She squeezes his hand and replies, "Yes, I can see now," holding back tears and appearing uncertain as to how she feels.

Cast

Charlie Chaplin - A Tramp
Virginia Cherrill - A Blind Girl
Florence Lee - The Blind Girl's Grandmother
Harry Myers - An Eccentric Millionaire
Al Ernest Garcia - The Eccentric Millionaire's Butler (as Allan Garcia)
Hank Mann - A Prizefighter
Robert Parrish - Newsboy
Henry Bergman - Mayor and Man in Basement
Albert Austin - Street Sweeper

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:

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Reception

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. 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." 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."

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.

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? .

Rock singer-songwriter Lou Reed wrote a tribute to Chaplin called "City Lights" on his 1979 album The Bells .