Review of City Lights

As much as I loved The Kid, The Gold Rush, Modern Times and The Great Dictator, City Lights is the film I consider Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece. And there are several reasons why this is so for me.

I love how City Lights is filmed, once again the cinematography is stunning as are the costumes and sets. The music is also a delight(though my favourite soundtrack in a Chaplin movie is the one for Modern Times) with plenty of themes that stuck in my head, while the sound effects are wonderfully incorporated and the subtitles easy to understand. The comedy is brilliantly done, the scene in the boxing ring is not only one of my favourite scenes in a Chaplin movie(along with the final sequence and the dance of the bread rolls of The Gold Rush, the final scene of The Kid and the speech from The Great Dictator) but ever in a comedy, while there is a very touching love story between the Tramp and the little blind girl(played touchingly by Virginia Cherrill) he falls in love with. And I also found the close-up climax achingly poignant because of its beauty and ambiguity. Chaplin is superb, his pantomime skills and physical humour are extremely well judged and he is acts beautifully with Cherrill.

Overall, yet another Chaplin masterpiece, yet for me this is the best of them all. 10/10 Bethany Cox