City Lights - Chaplin Collection (Limited Edition Collector's Set)

Starring:Jack Alexander (III), Henry Bergman, Betty Blair, Virginia Cherrill, Al Ernest Garcia, Mrs. Garcia, Joseph Herrick, A.B. Lane, Florence Lee, Hank Mann, Eddie McAuliffe, Harry Myers, Margaret Oliver, Mrs. Pope, John Rand, Cy Slocum, Mark Strong, Tiny Ward, Florence Wix
Studio: Creative Design Art
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
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

The Chaplin Collection, Vol. 2 (City Lights / The Circus / The Kid / A King in New York / A Woman of Paris / Monsieur Verdoux / The Chaplin Revue / Charlie - The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin)
Average customer rating:

Don't expect the box to last...

Superb and very entertaining

The true comedy collection

Films to Enjoy

Very good, with few complaints

The Chaplin Collection, Vol. 2 (City Lights / The Circus / The Kid / A King in New York / A Woman of Paris / Monsieur Verdoux / The Chaplin Revue / Charlie - The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin)
Starring: Charles Chaplin , and Charlie Chaplin
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00017LVRI
Release Date: 2004-03-09

Amazon.com

The second magnificent collection of Charlie Chaplin's work is even more stuffed with goodies than the first: six feature films, a round-up of two-reelers, and a new documentary, plus a cornucopia of deleted scenes and context. Each feature is accompanied by a half-hour "Chaplin Today" featurette, in which a filmmaker comments from a 21st-century perspective. Claude Chabrol extols the wicked virtues of Monsieur Verdoux and calls Chaplin "a thoroughly modern director," while Jim Jarmusch speaks gallantly on the political satire of the problematic A King in New York.

The Kid (1921), Chaplin's first feature, relates directly to Chaplin's own hard upbringing. The Tramp adopts a street kid (Jackie Coogan), in a seamless blend of slapstick and sentiment. For A Woman of Paris (1923), Chaplin experimented: straight, adult melodrama, with no Charlie onscreen (save for a brief cameo). 1927's The Circus is prized by many Chaplin critics as pure sublime comedy, less burdened by sentiment or politics than subsequent films. City Lights (1931) is an undisputed masterpiece; the Tramp befriends a blind girl, leading to one of the great bittersweet endings in film history. (Among the extras: a priceless seven-minute deleted scene involving little more than Chaplin and a piece of wood stuck in a grate.) With Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Chaplin turned his back on the Tramp and invented an elegant lady killer (literally); audiences disapproved, but the film stands as a fascinating essay on himself. Finally, after his exile from the United States, Chaplin made A King in New York (1957), which is mostly flat, except as autobiography.

The Chaplin Revue gathers six essential short works, from the superb A Dog's Life (1918) to his last two-reeler, The Pilgrim. A separate disc contains film critic Richard Schickel's comprehensive documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, which does nicely by Chaplin's life and his working process, with keen comments from admirers such as Woody Allen and Johnny Depp. This box set is more than film history; it's a living treasure. --Robert Horton

Description

The wonder. The magic. The genius. Now for an encore presentation with stunning new restorations, all-new special features and more. The Richard Schickel documentary, "Charlie" available exclusively in this Chaplin Giftset. THE CIRCUS The Little Tramp accidentally becomes a big-top star in the comedy that earned Chaplin a special Academy Award?. CITY LIGHTS A forever classic - and an American Film Institute Top-100 Movie. The Tramp becomes a working man, saving money for an operation that will restore a blind flower girl's sight. THE KID The Tramp and his ragamuffin sidekick (6-year-old Jackie Coogan) triumph over life's hard knocks in the landmark film that changed the notion of what a screen comedy could be. A KING IN NEW YORK/A WOMAN OF PARIS Chaplin jabs at social conventions! U.S. pop culture is the target of his satiric A King in New York. And the whirl of French high society frames director Chaplin's tragic love story A Woman of Paris.

MONSIEUR VERDOUX Killer comedy! Chaplin turns his sunny nature inside out to play a roving gent who wins the love and bank accounts of spinsters, then murders the hapless biddies.

Customer Reviews:

Don't expect the box to last..........2007-04-03

When my copy of this set arrived, I found that the set's box (with Chaplin on the cover) was just a little too big for the set itself - maybe an eighth of an inch extra space, so when the whole package got tightly shrinkwrapped, the excess space and the tip of one corner were crushed to fit around the DVDs. Not a huge deal, but it means that the box, already somewhat flimsy for the number of DVDs it houses, lost some of its structual integrity, and now doesn't support itself so well; once you take a couple of the DVDs out, it quickly loses its right angles -- the ramshackle rhombus effect. So I sent it back, and the replacement has just arrived...with the exact same problem. Of course, while Amazon makes it ever so easy to "Leave Seller Feedback" for any of its thousands of Amazon Marketplace affiliates, there is one seller for which they do not allow this option: Amazon itself. Anyway, I'm sure it's a great set, and the defect in question is minor, but it's always a little disappointing when you look forward to a new purchase, then find that it is just a tiny bit damaged before you even unwrap it. I have had this experience twice now, and I guess I'll just give up, and try not to look at what could have been a fairly handsome box. But when you get yours, set the box on a table with the DVD spines lined up in front of you, and have a look at the lower right-hand corner of the box. Hopefully, you *won't* see what I mean. But if you do, you'll find that this box would have been just perfect if the set had included one more, thin DVD.

Superb and very entertaining.......2007-01-19

Excellent variety of Chaplin movies that are worth many viewings and well-worth the price of the collection. Good quality DVD's of very old films. Monsieur Verdoux, a rare Chaplin "talkie", is dated in plot structure and appeal and includes several scenes of stilted acting (Chaplin is actually a better actor than the others in the cast). Although not of the caliber of the silent films, it makes an interesting addition to the masterpieces, if you are studying Chaplin's works and it is fascinating to hear Chaplin's voice. His physical comedy is artful, masterful, highly acrobatic, perfectly timed, surprising, and hilarious; it has not been surpassed in 80-plus years.

The true comedy collection.......2006-12-15

This wonderful boxed set completes the chaplin collection, this in my view is the better chaplin collection it includes such classics as city lights, modern times, the great dictator, and many more classics.my advice to the other chaplin fans is go out and buy the chaplin collection 1&2 before there all sold out.

Films to Enjoy.......2006-08-15

The fine Humor and art creativity found in this treasure films are incomparable. It's worth the price.

Very good, with few complaints.......2006-08-05

Once again, as with Volume 1, the main pieces of this box are first class, simply great quality reissues of Chaplins greatest (and less great) films. It's the other pieces that leave cause me to scratch my head.

So, let's start with what is good.

We have here some of Chaplin's finest silent work, including my favorite, The Circus. The films are expertly restored and projected at a speed which is about as close to the subjective "correct speed" as possible. The soundtracks are well restored, and there are plenty of cut scenes, outtakes and home movies to go along with the original films.

A couple of films are notoriously weak, and one just has to look at the box to figure out which ones those are. "Monsieur Verdoux" has only one disc, and "A Woman of Paris" and "A King in New York" actually share a 2 disc set. But these films are essential to completing Chaplin's legacy, and it is good to have them well issued and in as nice a presentation as possible.

There is a 5.1 surround soundtrack, which is really wierd, since these were issued in mono to start with. Why not just colorize the films while you're at it, M2K? (I know, some people just can't watch a film with a mono soundtrack, but this is really excessive.)

The we have the documentary by Richard Schickel, which, which good, is very frustrating. It's great to see brief clips of the Keystone films in excellent quality, but isn't it time to release the ENTIRE collection of Keystones in best-possible quality? WHEN, OH WHEN, WILL THIS HAPPEN!

Some argument could also be made that the short films in this collection could have been better considered. There are several different versions of some of these films, "Shoulder Arms" comes to mind, and it is quite possible that the version sused here are the best pictorial quality, but not the best acting quality. This is a very subjective topic, but I would have liked to see the original "Shoulder Arms" included as well, perhaps the most substantially different of the versions. This is a minor complaint, though.

The "Chaplin Today" documentaries, as in the first box set, are rather pathetic, and self-defeating in their attempts to make Chaplin relevent to today's audiences. If Chaplin wasn't relevent, then nobody would by this box set, and I wouldn't bother writing this review. But he is relevent. Trying to convice people so doesn't work, unfortunately, so we end up with these rather pathetic documentary attempts.

But overall, this is a collection of gems, and complaining about the ancillary pieces of this collection is like complaining about the floor in the room containing the Hope Diamond. It's only the actual films that matter, and they are superb.

City Lights - Chaplin Collection (Limited Edition Collector's Set)

Average customer rating:

City Lights
a beacon in the wilderness
Chaplin's Greatest Movie
The Little Tramp perseveres
"Can you see now?"

City Lights - Chaplin Collection (Limited Edition Collector's Set)
Starring: Jack Alexander (III) , Henry Bergman , Betty Blair , Virginia Cherrill , and Al Ernest Garcia
Manufacturer: Creative Design Art
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Classics | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Comedy | Genres | DVD | Video

Comedy | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

( C ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Modern Times (2 Disc Special Edition)
The Gold Rush (2 Disc Special Edition)
The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition)
The Kid (2 Disc Special Edition)
Double Indemnity (Universal Legacy Series)

ASIN: B00009WVQL
Release Date: 2003-11-11

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:

City Lights.......2007-06-20

A silent released when the talkie sensation was in full bloom, Chaplin's "City Lights" still swept the box office by storm. Produced, directed, edited, and scored by Chaplin himself, "City Lights" melds the sweet, harmlessly buffoonish antics of Chaplin's Little Tramp persona with a larger theme of humanistic social concern. As always, the comic sequences are exquisitely orchestrated, particularly a hilarious boxing match with Hank Mann, as a muscled pugilist. But the real highlight is that eye-opening final scene with Cherrill where Chaplin betrays a touch of something closer to angelic poignancy.

a beacon in the wilderness.......2007-06-11

this is my favorite chaplin movie, both hilariously funny and tenderly moving, as charlot gives his all to help the young blind girl, and then feels he must disappear once she regains her sight so she will not know who her benefactor is. i defy you not to guffaw during the prize fight, and i defy you not to weep at the denouement. plain & simple, a beautiful movie.

Chaplin's Greatest Movie.......2007-04-19

The crowning achievement from Hollywood's first legendary movie star, Charlie Chaplin in his 1931 masterpiece "City Lights" The inspiring and touching story a little tramp who is determined to help a beautiful blind girl with money, in which they have fallen for each other. One of the greatest American films of all time, Chaplin's best, a touching, funny & remarkable masterpiece. If you're Chaplin fan then this is the most must see film or for anyone who loves classic movies.

The Little Tramp perseveres.......2007-01-04

Charlie Chaplin is unparalleled to his abiltiy to pantomime, evoking a whole gamut of emotions playing the kind hearted Little Tramp in "City Lights". Chaplin went way out on a limb producing, directing, writing and composing the music for this 1931 silent film when talkies were the rage of Hollywood.

The crux of the story revolves around the infatuation by the Little Tramp for a blind flower girl played by Virginia Cherrill who he met as he traipsed around the city. In his sojourns Chaplin also met a suicidal schizophrenic millionaire bent on drowning himself in the river, played by Harry Myers, who he convinced to keep a stiff upper lip and work through his difficulties. Myers took Chaplin into his home, lavished him with anything he wished so long as he was tipsy. When he sobered, however, his attitude changed and he spurned the Little Tramp. This kept on happening a number of times throughout the film.

Meanwhile Chaplin tried to do anything to earn money to help the blind girl out of her monetary difficulties, comically working as a sanitation worker, and a boxer. He finally was able to coax $1000 from the millionaire while he was on a bender. He used the funds to pay the appreciative blind girl's debts and for an operation to restore her vision.

"City Lights" was a representation of the tough times of the Great Depression and Chaplin in his film proficiently evoked a feeling of hope for the possibility of better times in the future.

"Can you see now?" .......2007-01-01

Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" is the silent star's most poignant film. The laughs are in abundant supply but it is the tender closing moments of this film that makes it special.

While strolling about town one night, the Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) saves a millionaire (Harry Myers) from drowning. To show his gratitude, the wealthy man befriends his rescuer and the two of them find themselves mixed up in a series of misunderstandings. The Tramp also finds himself doing everything he can to aid a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) that he has become smitten with. Of especially high priority is securing the money she needs for an operation that will restore her sight.

Even though "City Lights" is a silent film, it actually does a better job of telling its story than most modern films. It accomplishes the single most important objective of narrative film - tell a good story and tell it well. "City Lights" succeeds admirably in this task and essentially serves as an example of cinema in its purest form. It is not characterized by pretentiousness, a bloated production design, overdone special effects, or unnecessary complications in the plot. Simply put, "City Lights" is an example of storytelling done with care and with a lot of heart.

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