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This article refers to the Charlie Chaplin film. For the San Fransisco bookstore see City Lights Bookstore. For the Glasgwegian sitcom see City Lights (sitcom).
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City Lights is a 1931 film written by, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin composed the musical score which comprised the majority of the sound on the film since there is no dialogue in the picture. His Little Tramp character tries to help a poor blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) that he has fallen in love with. It also stars Florence Lee and Harry Myers.
The Circus, released in 1928, was Chaplin's last film to debut before motion pictures with sound (known as "talkies" at the time) took over. Since The Circus, sound pictures quickly took over as the industry standard. It was not uncommon for silent actors to oppose the arrival of talking pictures. Had Chaplin been anybody else, he probably would have never been able to shoot City Lights as a silent film, but because of his power in Hollywood, and because he had almost complete control over his work, he was able to make this film silent (except for a few sparse sound effects, music, and some unintelligble sounds that mock speech).
Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles has been quoted as saying that this is his favorite movie of all time. In 1963, the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick what he felt were the top-ten films; he listed City Lights at number 5. In the 2003 documentary Chaplin: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, Woody Allen said it was Chaplin's best picture.
Charlie Chaplin was a known perfectionist; he was famous for doing many more takes than other directors at the time. At one point he actually fired Virginia Cherrill and began re-filming with Georgia Hale, Chaplin's co-star in The Gold Rush. This proved too expensive, even for his budget, and so he later re-hired Cherrill and was able to finish City Lights.
The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
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