City Lights - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

After an unsuccessful preview at the Tower theater in Los Angeles, City Lights premiered on January 30, 1931 at the Los Angeles Theater on Broadway in downtown LA. Albert Einstein and his wife were the guests of honor and the film received a standing ovation. It next premiered at the George M. Cohan Theater in New York, and at the Dominion in London in February.

Chaplin was nervous about reception of the film because by this time, silent films were becoming obsolete; Hollywood switched to sound films by the end of 1929. The film was enthusiastically received by Depression-era audiences, earning $5 million during its initial release, and became one of Chaplin's most financially successful and critically acclaimed works. 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." The New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall considered it "a film worked out with admirable artistry". On the other hand, Alexander Bakshy of The Nation was highly critical of City Lights, objecting against the silent format and over-sentimentality and describing it as "Chaplin's feeblest".

The popularity of City Lights endured, with the film's re-release in 1950 again having positive reception 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." Richard Meryman called the final scene one of the greatest moments in film history. Charles Silver, Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, states that the film is so highly regarded because it brought forth a new level of lyrical romanticism that did not appear 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 precarious nature of Romanticism in the real world as she unknowingly assaults him multiple times. Film.com critic Eric D. Snider says that by 1931, most Hollywood filmmakers either embraced talking pictures, resigned themselves to their inevitability or just gave up making movies, yet Chaplin held firm with his vision in this project. He also notes 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.

Several well-known directors have praised City Lights. Orson Welles said it was his favorite film. In a 1963 interview in the American magazine Cinema, Stanley Kubrick rated City Lights as fifth among his top ten films. In 1972, the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky placed City Lights as fifth among this 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." George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin "the only genius to come out of the movie industry". 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 the final scene of City Lights. The film has also been studied and written about by American and international film critics and scholars. For example, French experimental musician and film critic Michel Chion has written an analysis of City Lights, published as Les Lumières de la ville. Slavoj Žižek used the film as a primary example in his essay, "Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?".