City Lights

Release, reception, and legacy

Charlie Chaplin with Albert Einstein at the premiere of City Lights

Two weeks prior to the premiere, Chaplin decided to have an unpublicized preview at Los Angeles' Tower Theatre. It went poorly, attracting a small and unenthusiastic crowd.[47] Better results were seen at the gala premiere on January 30, 1931, at the Los Angeles Theater. Albert Einstein and his wife were the guests of honor, and the film received a standing ovation.[53] It next premiered at the George M. Cohan Theater in New York[54] where Chaplin closely supervised the release, spending the day doing interviews, and previously spending $60,000 on the advertising, as he was frustrated with what UA's publicists had come up with.[55] Chaplin demanded half of the total gross, and considering audiences would be more attracted by the film itself than its technology, he demanded higher ticket prices compared to talkies.[56]

Chaplin was nervous about the film's reception because silent films were becoming obsolete by then, and the preview had undermined his confidence. Nevertheless, City Lights became one of Chaplin's most financially successful and critically acclaimed works. Following the good reception by American audiences, with estimated theatrical rentals of $2 million,[57] a quarter of which came from its 12-week run at the Cohan,[56] Chaplin went on a sixteen-day world tour between February and March 1931, starting with a premiere at London's Dominion Theatre on February 27.[58] The film was enthusiastically received by Depression-era audiences, earning $4.25 million in worldwide rentals during its initial release.[3]

Reviews were mostly positive. A film critic for the Los Angeles Examiner said that "not since I reviewed the first Chaplin comedies way back in the two-reel days has Charlie given us such an orgy of laughs."[47] The New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall considered it "a film worked out with admirable artistry".[59] Variety declared it was "not Chaplin's best picture" but that certain sequences were "hilarious".[60] The New Yorker wrote that it was "on the order of his other [films], perhaps a little better than any of them" and that it gave an impression "not often—oh, very seldom—found in the movies; an indefinable impression perhaps best described as a quality of charm."[61] On the other hand, Alexander Bakshy of The Nation was highly critical of City Lights, objecting to the silent format and over-sentimentality and describing it as "Chaplin's feeblest".[56]

The popularity of City Lights endured, with the film's re-release in 1950 again positively received by audiences and critics. In 1949, the critic James Agee wrote in Life magazine, that the final scene was the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid."[62] Richard Meryman called the final scene one of the greatest moments in film history.[41] Charles Silver, Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, stated that the film is so highly regarded because it brought forth a new level of lyrical romanticism that had not appeared in Chaplin's earlier works. He adds that like all romanticism, it is based in the denial of the real world around it. When the film premiered, Chaplin was much older, he was in the midst of another round of legal battles with former spouse Lita Grey, and the economic and political climate of the world had changed. Chaplin uses the Girl's blindness to remind the Tramp of the precarious nature of romanticism in the real world, as she unknowingly assaults him multiple times.[63] Film.com critic Eric D. Snider said that by 1931, most Hollywood filmmakers either embraced sound films, resigned themselves to their inevitability, or just gave up making movies, yet Chaplin held firm with his vision in this project. He also noted that few in Hollywood had the clout to make a silent film at that late date, let alone do it well. One reason was that Chaplin knew the Tramp could not be adapted to talking movies and still work.[62]

Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles said it was his favorite film.[64] In a 1963 interview in the American magazine Cinema, Stanley Kubrick rated City Lights as fifth among his top ten films.[65] In 1972, the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky placed City Lights as fifth among his top ten and said of Chaplin, "He 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."[66] The acclaimed French filmmaker Robert Bresson placed this film as first and second on his top ten films of all time.[67] George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin "the only genius to come out of the movie industry".[68] Celebrated Italian director Federico Fellini often praised this film, and his Nights of Cabiria refers to 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 its final scene.[62] Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance has summarized all the best criticism and all the notable filmmakers who have singled out City Lights as their favorite Chaplin film throughout the decades in the Criterion Collection audio commentary track for the film.[69] Vance has written that among all the praise afforded the film can be added that "City Lights also holds the distinction of being Chaplin's own favorite of all his films."[70]

French experimental musician and film critic Michel Chion has written an analysis of City Lights, published as Les Lumières de la ville.[71] Slavoj Žižek used the film as a primary example in his essay "Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?".[72] Film critic Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four writing the film "contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp--the character said, at one time, to be the most famous image on earth."[73] He added the film in his Great Movies list.[73] Chaplin's original "Tramp" suit from the film was donated by him to the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County.[74]

City Lights was released as a dual-format Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2013, both of which include trailers of the film, archival footage from production, and an audio commentary track by Chaplin biographer and scholar Jeffrey Vance, among others. The new cover was illustrated by Canadian cartoonist Seth.[75]

Accolades

In 1952, Sight and Sound magazine revealed the results of its first poll for "The Best Films of All Time"; City Lights was voted #2, after Vittorio DeSica's Bicycle Thieves.[76] In 2002, City Lights ranked 45th on the critics' list.[77] That same year, directors were polled separately and ranked the film as 19th overall.[78] In 1991, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[5][6] In 2007, the American Film Institute's tenth anniversary edition of 100 Years... 100 Movies ranked City Lights as the 11th greatest American film of all time, an improvement over the 76th position on the original list.[79] AFI also chose the film as the best romantic comedy of American cinema in 2008's "10 Top 10".[80] The Tramp was number 38 on AFI's list of the 50 Best Heroes,[81] and the film ranked at 38th among the funniest films,[82] 10th among the greatest love stories,[83] and 33rd on the most inspiring films.[84] The film's original 1931 poster, illustrated by Hap Hadley,[1] was ranked 52nd on the AFI's list "Top 100 American Movie Poster Classics" in 2003.[85]

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

  • 1998: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – #76[86]
  • 2000: AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs – #38[87]
  • 2002: AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions – #10[88]
  • 2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains: The Tramp – #38 Hero[89]
  • 2003: AFI's 100 Years... 100 American Movie Poster Classics – #52[85]
  • 2006: AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers – #33[90]
  • 2007: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #11[91]
  • 2008: AFI's 10 Top 10: #1 Romantic Comedy Film[92]

The Village Voice ranked the film at number 37 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[93] The film was included in Time's All-Time 100 best movies list in 2005.[94] In 2006, Premiere issued its list of "The 100 Greatest Performances of all Time", putting Chaplin's performance as "The Tramp" at No. 44.[95] City Lights was ranked seventeenth on Cahiers du cinéma's 100 Greatest Films, a 2008 poll of 78 film historians and critics organized by Claude-Jean Philippe.[96] In the 2012 Sight & Sound polls, it was ranked the 50th-greatest film ever made in the critics' poll[97] and 30th in the directors' poll.[98] In the earlier 2002 version of the list the film ranked 45th among critics[99] and 19th among directors.[100][101] In 2015, City Lights ranked 18th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world.[102] The film was voted at No. 21 on the list of "The 100 greatest comedies of all time" by a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017.[103] In 2021 the film ranked 16th on Time Out magazine's list of The 100 best movies of all time.[104]


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