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DVD City Lights (2 Disc Special Edition)
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
Review(s): DVD City Lights (2 Disc Special Edition)
Very good movie: Worth Seeing by all...
Well, this movie is an undisputed classic, for a very good reason. The movie is very good, very funny, and almost very moving. Charlie Chaplin stars as his iconic 'Little Tramp' in a movie that is sure to delight even those who cringe at the idea of black and white, silent movies.
The Little Tramp, the lovable homeless man with a heart of gold, wanders around town and saves a millionare from suicide. He convinces the rich man that there is indeed reason to live, which the rich man interprets as 'let's get drunk.' Unfortunately, the memory of the rich man gets erased every time he stares at the bottom of the bottle. So, in the morning he forgets the poor Little Tramp, but the next night remembers his best friend once again, after a few shots of liquor of course. This cycle is repeated through the whole film...
At the same time, the Little Tramp is courting a blind flowergirl. Because the Little Tramp always hangs around the rich man, it always seems as though he has money, so the blind girl mistakes him for a rich man as well. However, when the blind girl needs the money, the Little Tramp is without it...
All Charlie Chaplin movies are a sort of progressive breakdown of your serious defences. Allow me to explain: I never find the first 20 or so minutes funny, but then something happens, something so hilarious that it opens the floodgates and then every little gesture of Charlie Chaplin is hilarious. This movie was no different. The 'flaming fanny' incident did it for me... once you see the movie, I am sure you will agree. This is the reason why, in order to truly appreciate a Charlie Chaplin film, it is necessary to watch it from beginning to end... every joke, every repetition and gesture compounds in humour as the movie goes on.
As most other Charlie Chaplin films that I have seen, this one contains a message... However, in City Lights the message is one bashing the bourgoise, sort of. The rich man, who befriends the Little Tramp, is a bitter crank when sober and a lovable, huggable party animal when inebriated. So what's the message? Well, rich people are great when they are drunk, but the suck when they are sober... Well, that's not quite it really. This movie is another one of Charlie Chaplin's that speaks out against poverty and desperation- more of less in the same vein as Modern Times.
So watch the movie, you got nothing to lose. You won't be asking for an hour and a half of your life back. No, you'll be laughing and you probably won't even know why... or you will... I don't know...
A timeless classic
This is one of the best movies Chaplin ever made. The content is very simple, but the message it carries is grate. A kind approach to the best human feelings: love, friendship, loyalty, support to the less fortunate; those feelings are hard to find in these days. On the other hand the music is fantastic, the photography also. My recommendation: a must see, and show it to your children too.
Legends Never Grow Old
Charlie Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS is indeed a magnificent film. Once again, Chaplin plays the lovable Little Tramp who goes on with his business, but along the way, he happens to get caught in mischief and misunderstanding. In CITY LIGHTS he becomes smitten with the blind flower girl he meets on the corner of the street, and he poses as a millionaire. He goes on a mission to find money to pay for her operation in order to restore her eyesight. Through several unfortunate escapades and pandemonium, the Little Tramp saves the day, but not without the cost of mistaken identity; he serves seasons in jail after being accused of stealing the money to pay for the girl's operation. Nevertheless, in the end, as most old Hollywood films portray, the flower girl and the little tramp reunite, and it is the most touching and memorable moments in film history.
CITY LIGHTS is a highly sentimental film, which makes it the most legendary films in American film history. As the silent film age was waning during the 1930s, CITY LIGHTS happened to capture one of the last glimpse of an age that would soon pass with the advent of sound pictures. The cinematography is exceptional as well as the accompanying soundtrack. The best thing about CITY LIGHTS as well as other silent films is how actors spoke through their acting and facial expressions.
This film is recommended for all. For those who enjoy old classic movies that have a mix of romance, comedy, action, and little high jinx, this film has it all. They sure do not make 'em like this anymore.
Related DVD's City Lights (2 Disc Special Edition)
Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an automatic feeding apparatus. The pantomime is triumphant, but Chaplin also draws a lively relationship between the Tramp and a street gamine. She's played by Paulette Goddard, then Chaplin's wife and probably his best leading lady (here and in The Great Dictator). The film's theme gave the increasingly ambitious writer-director a chance to speak out about social issues, as well as indulging in the bittersweet quality of pathos that critics were already calling "Chaplinesque." In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out against... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard - Henry Bergman Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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After the box-office failure of his first dramatic film, A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin brooded over his ensuing comedy. "The next film must be an epic!" he recalled in his autobiography. "The greatest!" He found inspiration, paradoxically, in stories of the backbreaking Alaskan gold rush and the cannibalistic Donner Party. These tales of tragedy and endurance provided Chaplin with a rich vein of comic possibilities. The Little Tramp finds himself in the Yukon, along with a swarm of prospectors heading over Chilkoot Pass (an amazing sight restaged by Chaplin in his opening scenes, filmed in the snowy Sierra Nevadas). When the Tramp is trapped in a mountain cabin with two other fortune hunters, Chaplin stages a veritable ballet of starvation, culminating in the cooking of a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Kid is one of the purest expressions of Charlie Chaplin's art on film. It unites Chaplin with a boy he had spotted in a vaudeville act, 6-year-old Jackie Coogan--whose life would lead to the child-protective Coogan Act and a role as Uncle Fester on TV. The story has the Tramp adopting an abandoned waif and teaching him streetwise survival skills. The gags are flawless, but for Chaplin the huge advance (other than a running time longer than his two-reelers) was the exploration of a rich vein of sentiment; the emotionally wrenching separation of the Tramp and the Kid is probably the most Dickensian sequence ever captured on film. Chaplin drew on his own rough childhood for the material (and may have been inspired by the death of an infant son immediately before beginning the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Edna Purviance - Jackie Coogan Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. (Strangely, the two men were born within four days of each other.) The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Buster Keaton's career reached its creative apex with this rousing comic adventure. Not merely one of the finest silent films, this remains one of the great film comedies of all time. The Great Stone Face stars as Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray, a man with only two loves: the sweet Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) and his trustworthy engine, the eponymous General. When Fort Sumner is fired upon he's one of the first to enlist, but when the war office rejects him (he's too valuable as a trained engineer) his sweetie rejects him as a coward. Johnny has the opportunity to prove his bravery when Yankee spies steal his engine and inadvertently kidnap Annabelle, and Johnny pursues with all the resources at his disposal: handcar, bicycle, and finally railroad engine. Keaton's love/hate... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Buster Keaton Director(s): Buster Keaton - Clyde Bruckman DVD Release Date: Released the 20 November 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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