Product Details

• Actors: Jack Alexander (III), Henry Bergman, Betty Blair, Virginia Cherrill, Al Ernest Garcia
• Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: January 1, 1998
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (103 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302561833
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,765 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

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Editorial Reviews

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable. My favorite Chaplin film, January 29, 2001

By	Hubert Vigilla (San Diego, California USA) - See all my reviews

Though some here and in other circles have remarked that they believe "City Lights" is overrated and over-sentimental, I still believe that one cannot deny how moving and beautiful the film becomes as it draws toward its conclusion. "City Lights" remains my favorite Chaplin movie with "Modern Times" coming in at a close second. Chaplin plays his classic Tramp character who falls for a blind flower girl and wants to help her earn money for an operation to cure blindness. The boxing scene in which the scrawny Chaplin takes on a seasoned prize fighter is the major comic highlight of the film featuring gags that have been imitated and recycled by countless other comedies. The finale is nothing short of touching, beautiful, and brilliant and shows perfectly the full emotion that can be conveyed in a silent picture. This is one of the few films that still, time and time again, can bring tears to my eyes. "City Lights" is a masterpiece.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Ending -- great score, February 16, 2000

By	Stresspuppy (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Lights (DVD)

a must for any movie collection. the dvd version is clean and provides two audio options, the original mono and a rich version re-recorded in stereo in 1989 for Chaplin's centennial. the stereo score adds quite a bit to the mood of the film.

of interest as well, is a brief collection of annotation/changes by Chaplin to the original concept of the film.

the movie itself is a great tribute to Chaplin's genius. there is the wonderful story line with great humorous moments like the 'audio' joke in the beginning, the whirlwind dance scene, the boxing match, then it ends... well, the end is acted simply but precisely and is compelling in its ambiguity. absolutely one of the greatest cinematic ending of all time.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Little Tramp's apotheosis., April 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: City Lights (DVD)

A few years after the advent of "talkies", Charlie Chaplin, with his 1931 film *City Lights*, provided the much-needed reminder that cinema remained (remains) a VISUAL medium. Two people yapping at each other while sitting on a divan was simply not going to cut the mustard, a fact that a visionary like Chaplin saw from the beginning. Right at the outset he makes fun of the incessant jabber that had sprung up in the movies after the discovery of sound synchronization. In a public square, a politico squawks incoherently while dedicating a new statue. He sounds, in fact, rather like the teacher on the Peanuts Gang cartoons: "bwah bwah bwah". Later in the scene, Chaplin's Little Tramp squawks too . . . and that's the only concession to "talking" in *City Lights*. After that, it's back to basics, meaning: gags, drunken gags, slapstick gags in a boxing ring, and of course the vaunted Chaplinesque sentimentality, laid on thick here via a poor blind girl who sells flowers for a living. It can be argued that the gags and their set-ups might not be quite as inspired (or funny) as the ones in his earlier films. Chaplin was in his early forties here, and it shows: he's less physically agile; he looks a bit tired, occasionally (though not during that famous boxing scene). Even so, there's an almost defiant tinge to the stunts and the humor, an "I'm still here!" attitude that seems to say that even if the repertoire is getting tired, no one can do it better than the film's director and star. For me, what pushes the movie from 4 Stars to 5 Stars is the devastating and ambiguous last sequence, which will hit you in the solar plexus so hard that tears will be forced from your eyes. Somehow the astonishing climax rises above the typically sentimental set-up and attains the pinnacle of artistic sublimity. James Agee opined that the finale constituted the "highest moment in the history of the movies". He may be right.