Amazon.com Essentials:
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
