City Lamp is an American romantic comedy romantic comedy 1931 written, produced, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misfortune of Chaplin's Tramp when he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a flaming friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers).
Although the sound film was on the rise when Chaplin began developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working with silent production. The filming began in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. The city lights marked the first time Chaplin had scored a movie for one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as the main motive for the blind flower girl, is the song "La Violetera" ("Who'll Buy My Violets") from the Spanish composer JosÃÆ'Â © Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.
City Lights immediately successful on January 30, 1931 with positive reviews and box office receipts of $ 5 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest achievement of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films of all time. In 1991, the Library of Congress voted for City Preservation for preservation in the US National Film Registry as "significant cultural, historical, or aesthetic". In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked 11th in the list of the best American films ever made. In 1949, critic James Agee called the film's last scene "the biggest piece of acting ever performed on celluloid".
Video City Lights
Plot
Residents and officials gathered for the opening of a new monument to "Peace and Welfare". After babbling talk, the veil was lifted to reveal the Little Tramp asleep on the lap of one of the sculpted figures. After a few minutes of slapstick he managed to escape from the wrath of the assembly to move the city. He scolded two newspapermen who taunted him for his cruelty, and while shyly admiring the bare statue had a near-fatal encounter with a sidewalk elevator.
The Tramp meets a beautiful girl on a street corner and on the way buying flowers realizes that she is blind; he immediately attracted. Through an aural coincidence, the girl makes a mistake of her customers for the owner of the luxury car being steered.
That night, the Tramp rescued a drunken millionaire from suicide. The millionaire brought his new best friend back to his house to drink champagne, then (after a failed suicide attempt) to go out on a night in town. After helping the millionaire's house the next morning, he sees the flower girl on his way to the corner of his path. The Tramp gets money from a millionaire and captures the girl; he bought all his flowers and moved his house in a millionaire car.
After the Tramp leaves, the flower girl tells her grandmother (Florence Lee) about her good and rich friend. Meanwhile, the Tramp returns to the mansion, where the millionaire - now conscious - does not remember it and tells the waiter to throw it away. Later that day, the millionaire was once again drunk and, seeing the Tramp on the street, invited him home for a lavish party. The history of the next morning repeats itself: the millionaire is drunk and the Tramp again in his ear.
Finding that the girl was not on the usual street corner, Tramp went to her apartment, where through the window she overheard a doctor telling her grandmother that the girl was seriously ill: "She has a fever and needs attention." Determined to help, Tramp takes on a job as a street sweeper.
At lunch break, she brought a grocery store while her grandmother was selling flowers. To cheer her up, she read the newspaper aloud; in it is a story about the medicine of blindness of Viennese doctors. "Good, then I'll be able to see you," the girl said - and Tramp was struck by what might happen if she got her eyesight and found that she was not the rich man she imagined. He also finds the eviction notice that the girl's grandmother has been hidden. As he leaves, he promises her that he will pay the rent.
The Tramp goes back to work to find himself fired - he's too late too often. The boxer convinces him to fight in a fake battle; they will "go easy" with each other and share prize money. But the boxer fled after he found out he was going to be arrested; his place was taken by an earnest fighter, who knocked the Tramp out despite the creative and agile efforts of the Tramp to keep out of reach.
The Tramp meets a drunken millionaire for the third time and is once again invited to the mansion. The Tramp connects the girl's misery and the millionaire gives her money for her operation. Two robbers dropped the millionaire and took the rest of the money. The thieves fled before the arrival of the police, who found the Tramp with the money the millionaire gave him; because of the knock on his head, the millionaire does not remember giving it. The Tramp spared the police long enough to get money for the girl, telling him that he would be away for a while, but in time he was arrested and imprisoned.
Months later Tramp is released. He went to the girl's usual corner of the street but she was not there. We learned that the girl - her vision recovered - now has a successful florist with her grandmother. But he does not forget his mysterious philanthropist, whom he imagines rich and handsome: when an elegant man enters the shop, he wonders for a moment if "he" has returned.
The Tramp happened in the shop, where the girl arranged the flowers in the window. He bent to pick up the flower that was dumped in the gutter. After a brief battle with old people, a newspaperman, he turns to the shop window where he suddenly sees the girl, who has been watching her without (of course) knowing who she is. When he saw it, he froze for a few seconds, then grinned. The girl was flattered and giggled to her employees: "I have made a conquest!" Through the pantomime through the glass, he happily offered him fresh flowers (to replace the crushed ones he took from the gutter) and the coins.
Suddenly embarrassed, Tramp begins to scramble, but the girl steps up to the door of the shop and again offers flowers, which she embarrassesly receives. He held his hand and pressed the coin into it. Suddenly he stopped; his smile turned into a confused expression. He runs his fingers over his arms, his shoulders, his collar, then draws his breath: "You?" The Tramp nodded with an uncertain smile and asked, "Can you see now?" The girl replied, "Yes, I can see now" and crying as he pulled his hand to his chest. The uncertainty in Tramp's face turns into joy as the film fades into black.
Maps City Lights
Cast
- Virginia Cherrill as a blind girl
- Florence Lee as his grandmother
- Harry Myers as an eccentric millionaire
- Al Ernest Garcia as his butler (credited as Allan Garcia)
- Hank Mann as prizefighter
- Charlie Chaplin as A Tramp
Cast Not Specified
- Robert Parrish as a newspaper guy
- Henry Bergman as Mayor and blind neighbor under girl
- Albert Austin as a street sweeper/thief
- Jean Harlow as an addition in the nightclub scene (cut from the movie)
Production
Pre-production
Chaplin's The Circus feature, released in 1928, was his last film before the film industry took sound recordings and brought the era of this silent film closer. As a producer and distributor of its own (the owner of a section of United Artists), Chaplin can still envisage City Lights
In early 1928, Chaplin began writing scripts with Harry Carr. The plot gradually grew out of an early concept that Chaplin had considered after the success of The Circus, where a blind circus clown and had to hide his handicap from his young daughter by pretending that his inability to see was pratfalls. This inspired the Blind Girl. The first scene Chaplin thought was the end of the story, in which the recovered blind girl saw Little Tramp for the first time. A very detailed description of the scene was written, as Chaplin considers it the center of the whole film.
For the plot, Chaplin was first considered an even lower character on a social scale, a black newspaper mover. Eventually he chose a drunken millionaire, a character previously used in short 1921 The Idle Class . This millionaire plot is based on the old idea of ​​Chaplin for a short time where two millionaires take the Little Tramp from the city dump and show a good time at an expensive club before lowering it in a landfill, so when he wakes up, the Tramp will not know if it's real or dreams. This was rewritten into a millionaire who was a friend of Tramp when drunk but did not recognize him while drunk.
Chaplin officially started the pre-production of the film in May 1928 and hired Australian art director Henry Clive to design the summer set. Chaplin eventually throws Clive into the role of a millionaire. Although the film was originally in Paris, the art direction was inspired by a mixture of several cities. Robert Sherwood said that "this city is bizarre, with a confusing similarity to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangiers and Council Bluffs.That is not a city on earth and these are all cities."
On August 28, 1928, Chaplin's mother Hannah Chaplin died at the age of 63. Chaplin was desperate for several weeks and pre-production did not continue until mid-autumn 1928. Psychologist Stephen Weissman has hypothesized that the City Lights very autobiographical, with a blind girl representing Chaplin's mother, while a drunken millionaire representing Chaplin's father. Weissman also compared many sets of films with locations from the real Chaplin's childhood, like a statue in an opening scene that resembles St. Church. Mark at Kennington Park Road and Chaplin which refers to the seaside set as the Thames Embankment.
Chaplin has interviewed several actresses to play the blind flower girl but was not impressed with them all. While watching a movie shoot with a bathing woman on Santa Monica beach, she finds an ordinary acquaintance, Virginia Cherrill. Cherrill waved and asked if he would get a chance to work with him. After a series of bad auditions from other actresses, Chaplin finally invited her to do a screen test. She was the first actress who subtly and convincingly acted blindly in front of the camera because she was so close, and Cherrill signed on November 1, 1928.
Primary photography
Filming for the City Lamp officially began on December 27, 1928, after Chaplin and Carr had been working on the script for almost a full year. As a filmmaker, Chaplin is known as a perfectionist; he was famous for doing more "taking" than any other director at the time. Production begins with the first scene on the flower stand where Little Tramp first meets Blind Flower Girl. The scene took weeks to take, and Chaplin first began to have second thoughts about casting Cherrill. Years later, Cherrill said, "I never liked Charlie and he never liked me." In his autobiography, Chaplin assumes responsibility for the tension he experiences with Cherrill, who blames the stress of making the film for conflict. The filming of the scene continued until February 1929 and again for ten days in early April before Chaplin set aside the scene for later filming. He then fired the opening scene of Little Tramp awakened in the newly introduced general statue. This scene involves up to 380 extras and mainly makes Chaplin stress. During this part of the shooting, construction is underway at Chaplin Studios because the city of Los Angeles has decided to widen La Brea Avenue and Chaplin was forced to move some buildings away from the road.
Chaplin then shoots the order in which Little Tramp first meets the millionaire and prevents him committing suicide. During the filming, Henry Clive suddenly decided that he did not want to jump into the cold water tank at the scene, causing Chaplin to storm the set and shoot Clive. He was quickly replaced by Harry Myers, whom Chaplin knew while under contract at Keystone Studios. Chaplin finished shooting the sequence on 29 July 1929 with an exterior at Pasadena Bridge. Chaplin then shoots the sequence that was ultimately cut from a movie involving Little Tramp trying to pick up a stick attached to the wall. The scene included the young Charles Lederer; Chaplin then praised the scene, but insisted that it needed to be cut. He then continued filming the scene with millionaires until 29 September 1929.
In November, Chaplin began working with Cherrill again in some of the less dramatic Girl scenes. While waiting for the scene for several months, Cherrill became bored and publicly complained to Chaplin. During the filming of one scene, Cherrill asks Chaplin if he can leave early so he can go to the hair show. Chaplin fired Virginia Cherrill and replaced him with Georgia Hale, Chaplin's co-star at The Gold Rush. However, Hale's screen test proves that he is not fit for the role. Chaplin also briefly considered the sixteen-year-old actress, Violet Krauth, but she was discussed with this idea by her collaborators. Chaplin eventually rented Cherrill to complete the City Lights . He demanded and got a $ 75 increase per week. About seven minutes of Hale's test recording survived and included in the DVD release; quotes were first seen in the documentary Uniri Chaplin along with unopened opening sequences.
Chaplin then threw Florence D. Lee as his grandmother and Blind Girl girl who took the scene with Cherrill and Lee for five weeks. At the end of 1929, Chaplin again photographed the first Flower Shop scene with Cherrill. This time, the scene was over in six days and Chaplin was pleased with Cherrill's performance. Chaplin has been filming for a year and just a little over half way through. From March to April 1930, Chaplin shot a scene inside the millionaire's house at Town House on Wilshire Boulevard. He hired Joe Van Meter and Albert Austin, whom he had known since his days worked for Fred Karno, as a thief. In the late spring of 1930, Chaplin shot the last major comedy sequence: boxing match. Chaplin hired Keystone actor Hank Mann to play the Tramp opponent. The scene takes an extra 100 and Chaplin takes four days to practice and six for filming a scene and shot between 23 and 30 June. Chaplin was initially nervous over the presence for this scene so he invited his friends to be extra. More than 100 extras are present. Chaplin's appearance in the scene was so funny that more people came every day to be extra.
In July and August, Chaplin completed a smaller six-week scene, including two Tramp scenes harassed by newsboys, one of which was played by young Robert Parrish.
In September 1930, Chaplin finished filming the iconic final scene that took six days. Chaplin said that he was happy with Cherrill's performance on the scene, and that he finally understood his role. When talking about his directing style on set, Chaplin stated that "everything I do is a dance, I think in terms of dance, I think more in the City Lights."
From October to December 1930, Chaplin edited the movie and created a title card. When he finished the film, the silent film became unpopular. But the City Lights is one of the outstanding financial and artistic achievements of Chaplin's career, and it is his personal favorite of his films. Especially likes the last scene, she said, "[I] n City Lights just the last scene... I do not act.... Almost sorry, standing outside me and seeing.. It's a beautiful sight , beautiful, and therefore not too much. "
The number of films used for the picture was not as it used to be at the time and is a sign of a long production process. Chaplin shot 314,256 feet of film, and the finished film ran 8,093 feet. This makes the shooting ratio of nearly 39 feet of film for each film leg that makes it in the final version.
Music
City Lights marks the first time Chaplin scores film for one of his productions. While Chaplin prefers the film to have a live sound, in the 1930s most theaters had rid of their orchestra. Many critics claim he did it to get more credit. Chaplin, whose parents and many Chaplin family members are both musicians, is struggling with the professional musicians he hires and takes on his own to score. It was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston and included over a hundred musical cues. Chaplin told a reporter that "I really did not write it down, I la-laed and Arthur Johnson wrote it down, and I hope you'll give him credit because he's doing a really good job.It's all simple music, you know, according to my character. "The goal is to have a score that will translate the emotion of the character through the melody. The score was recorded in five days with musical arrangements Alfred Newman.
The main theme used as the main motive for the blind flower girl is the song "La Violetera" ("Who'll Buy My Violets") from the Spanish composer JosÃÆ'Â © Padilla. Chaplin could not secure the original songwriter, Raquel Meller, in the lead role, but used the song as the main theme. Chaplin lost the lawsuit to Padilla (which took place in Paris, where Padilla lived) for not crediting him. Some of the modern editions released for the video include a new recording by Carl Davis.
Release, acceptance, and inheritance
Two weeks before the premiere, Chaplin decided to have an unpublished preview in Los Angeles' Tower Theater. It runs poorly, attracts a small crowd and is not enthusiastic. Better results were seen at the premiere gala on January 30, 1931 at the Los Angeles Theater. Albert Einstein and his wife were guests of honor, and the film received a standing ovation. This was next aired at George M. Cohan Theater in New York where Chaplin closely watched the release, spent the day doing interviews, and earlier spent $ 60,000 on advertising, as he was frustrated with what the UA publicist had come up with. Chaplin demands half of the gross total, and considering the audience will be more interested in the movie itself than the technology, it demands a higher ticket price compared to the talkie.
Chaplin was nervous about filming because the silent movie became obsolete at the time, and the preview had damaged her confidence. However, City Lights became one of Chaplin's most financially successful and highly acclaimed works. After a good reception by American audiences, with a $ 2 million income, a quarter of those from 12 weeks running in Cohan, Chaplin went on a sixteen world tour between February and March 1932, beginning with premiere at the London Dominion Theater on 27 February. The film was greeted enthusiastically by the Depression-era audience, earning $ 5 million during its initial release.
Reviews are mostly positive. A film critic for the Los Angeles Examiner said that "not since I reviewed Chaplin's first comedy street in the two-reel period, Charlie gave us an orgy of laughter like that." The New York Times Mordaunt Hall reviewer considers it "a movie made with amazing art". Variety states it's "not the best Chaplin's picture" but that's a certain "funny." The New Yorker writes that it's "in another [movie] sequence, maybe a bit better than them" and it gives the impression "not often - oh, very rarely - found in the movie; an unexplained impression probably best described as the quality of charm. "On the other hand, Alexander Bakshy of The Nation is very critical of the City Lights, objecting to the silent format and overly sentimental and describing it as" Chaplin's feeblest ".
The popularity of City Lights persisted, with the re-release of the film in 1950 again greeted positively by spectators and critics. In 1949, critic James Agee wrote in Life magazine that the last scene was "the biggest piece of acting ever done on celluloid." Richard Meryman calls the last scene as one of the greatest moments in film history. Charles Silver, Film Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, stated that the film is highly respected for bringing a new level of lyrical romance that did not appear in Chaplin's earlier works. He adds that like all romance, it is based on real world rejection around it. When the movie aired, Chaplin was much older, he was in the midst of another legal battle round with his former Lita Gray partner, and the world's economic and political climate has changed. Chaplin uses Girl's blindness to remind the Tramp of a dangerous nature of romance in the real world, because he involuntarily strikes him repeatedly. Film.com critic Eric D. Snider said that in 1931, most Hollywood filmmakers who embraced the talking pictures, resigned to inevitable, or simply gave up filming, but Chaplin remained steadfast with his vision in this project. He also noted that some in Hollywood had the effect of making silent films on that late date, let alone doing it well. One reason was that Chaplin knew that the Tramp could not be adapted to speak the movie and keep working.
Several famous directors praised City Lights . Orson Welles said it was his favorite movie. In a 1963 Interview on American magazine Cinema, Stanley Kubrick rated the City Lamp as the fifth among the top ten films. In 1972, renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky placed the city lights as the fifth among the top ten and said of Chaplin, "He is the only one who has come down into history cinematic without the slightest doubt.The films he left will never grow old. "George Bernard Shaw calls Chaplin" the only genius out of the film industry ". Famous Italian director, Federico Fellini, often praises this movie, and 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 photograph. Allen is said to have based the final scene of his 1979 movie Manhattan in his last scene. Chaplin biography Jeffrey Vance has summarized all the best critics and all the famous filmmakers who have chosen City Lights as their favorite Chaplin movie for decades on the Criteria audio commentary track for the film. Vance has written that among all the praise given, the film can be added that "City Lights also has the distinction as Chaplin's own favorite of all his films."
Experimental musician and French film critic Michel Chion has written an analysis of the City Lights, published as Les LumiÃÆ'¨res de la ville . Slavoj? I? Ek used the film as a prime example in his essay "Why Do Letters Always Arrive at Their Destination?". The original Chaplin "Tramp" Jas from the film was donated by him to the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County.
City Lamp is ranked seventeen on the best films Cahiers du cinÃÆ'Â © ma's 100 Greatest
City Lights was released as a dual format Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion Collection in 2013, both of which include film footage, record production archives and audio commentary tracks by Chaplin biographer. and scholar Jeffrey Vance, among others. The new cover is illustrated by Canadian cartoonist Seth.
Accolades
In 1952, Sight and Sound published its first poll results for "The Best Films of All Time"; City Lights selected # 2, after Vittorio DeSica Bicycle Thief . In 2002, City Lights was ranked 45th in the critics list. In the same year, the directors were surveyed separately and rated the film as the 19th overall. In 1992, the Library of Congress voted for City Conservation for preservation in the US National Film Registry as "significant cultural, historical, or aesthetic." In 2007, the tenth anniversary edition of the American Film Institute of 100 Years... 100 Movies rated the City Lights as the 11th largest American film of all time, an increase over 76th position on the original list. AFI also chose this film as the best romantic comedy of American cinema in 2008 "10 Top 10". The Tramp is number 38 on the list of 50 AFI Best Heroes, and the film is ranked 38th among the funniest films, 10 of the greatest love story, and the 33rd in the most inspiring movie.
The film is recognized by the American Film Institute in this list:
- 1998: AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies - # 76
- 2000: AFI 100 Years... 100 Laughs - # 38
- 2002: AFI 100 Years... 100 Passions - # 10
- 2003: AFI 100 Years... 100 Heroes & amp; Criminals:
- The Tramp - # 38 Hero
- 2005: 100 Years AFI Film Score - Nominated
- 2006: AFI 100 Years... 100 Cheers - # 33
- 2007: AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - # 11
- 2008: 10 Top 10 AFI:
- Romantic Comedy # 1
See also
- List of US comedy movies
References
Bibliography
External links
- City Lights
- City Lights in Rotten Tomatoes
- City Lights
- City Light in AllMovie
- Filming City Lights
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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