City Lights Movie Hindi

[Albina Hickel]

CityLights is a 1931 American synchronized sound romantic comedy-drama film written, produced, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers).

Although talking pictures (or films with recorded dialogue) were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working without dialogue only incorporating sound with the use of a synchronized musical score with sound effects. Filming started in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. City Lights marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song "La Violetera" ("Who'll Buy my Violets") from Spanish composer Jos Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.

City Lights was immediately successful upon release on March 7, 1931, with positive reviews and worldwide rentals of more than $4 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films of all time. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance believes "City Lights is not only Charles Chaplin's masterpiece; it is an act of defiance" as it premiered four years into the era of sound films which began with the premiere of The Jazz Singer (1927).[4] In 1991, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[5][6] In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it 11th on its list of the best American films ever made. In 1949, the critic James Agee called the film's final scene "the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid".[7]

Citizens and dignitaries are assembled for the unveiling of a new monument to "Peace and Prosperity". After droning speeches, the veil is lifted to reveal the Little Tramp asleep in the lap of one of the sculpted figures. After several minutes of slapstick, he manages to escape the assembly's wrath to perambulate the city. He rebukes two newsboys who taunt him for his shabbiness, and while coyly admiring a nude statue has a near-fatal encounter with a sidewalk elevator.

The Tramp encounters the beautiful flower girl on a street corner and in the course of buying a flower realizes she is blind; he is instantly smitten. The girl mistakes the Tramp for a wealthy man when the door of a chauffeured automobile slams shut as he departs.

Finding that the girl is not at her usual street-corner, the Tramp goes to her apartment, where he overhears a doctor tell the grandmother that the girl is very ill: "She has a fever and needs careful attention." Determined to help, the Tramp takes a job as a street sweeper.

The Tramp encounters the drunken millionaire a third time and is again invited to the mansion. The Tramp relates the girl's plight and the millionaire gives him money for her operation. Burglars knock the millionaire out and take the rest of his money. The police find the Tramp with the money given to him by the millionaire, who because of the knock on the head does not remember giving it. The Tramp evades the police long enough to get the money to the girl, telling her he will be going away for a time; in due course he is apprehended and imprisoned.

The Tramp happens by the shop, where the girl is arranging flowers in the window. He stoops to retrieve a flower discarded in the gutter. After a brief skirmish with his old nemeses, the newsboys, he turns to the shop's window through which he suddenly sees the girl, who has been watching him without (of course) knowing who he is. At the sight of her he is frozen for a few seconds, then breaks into a broad smile. The girl is flattered and giggles to her employee, "I've made a conquest!" Via pantomime through the glass she offers him a fresh flower (to replace the crushed one he took from the gutter) and a coin.

Suddenly embarrassed, the Tramp begins to shuffle away, but the girl steps to the shop door and again offers the flower, which he shyly accepts. She takes his hand and presses the coin into it, then abruptly stops and her smile turns to a look of puzzlement as she recognizes the touch of his hand. She runs her fingers along his arm, his shoulder, his lapels, then gasps, "You?" The Tramp nods and asks, "You can see now?" The girl replies, "Yes, I can see now", and presses his hand to her heart with a tearful smile. Relieved and elated, the Tramp smiles back.

Chaplin's feature The Circus, released in 1928, was his last film before the motion picture industry embraced sound recording and brought the silent movie era to a close. As his own producer and distributor (part owner of United Artists), Chaplin could still conceive City Lights as a silent film. Technically the film was a crossover, as its soundtrack had synchronized music and sound effects but no spoken dialogue. The dialogue was presented on intertitles.[9] Chaplin was first contacted by inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste in 1918 about making a sound film, but he never ended up meeting with Lauste.[10] Chaplin was dismissive about "talkies" and told a reporter that he would "give the talkies three years, that's all."[11] He was also concerned about how to adjust the Little Tramp to sound films.[11]

In early 1928, Chaplin began writing the script with Harry Carr. The plot gradually grew from an initial concept Chaplin had considered after the success of The Circus, where a circus clown goes blind and has to conceal his handicap from his young daughter by pretending that his inability to see are pratfalls.[11] This inspired the Blind Girl. The first scenes Chaplin thought up were of the ending, where the newly cured blind girl sees the Little Tramp for the first time.[12] A highly detailed description of the scene was written, as Chaplin considered it to be the center of the entire film.[13]

For a subplot, Chaplin first considered a character even lower on the social scale, a black newsboy. Eventually he opted for a drunken millionaire, a character previously used in the 1921 short The Idle Class.[14] The millionaire plot was based on an old idea Chaplin had for a short in which two millionaires pick up the Little Tramp from the city dump and show him a good time in expensive clubs before dropping him back off at the dump, so when he woke up, the Tramp would not know if it was real or a dream. This was rewritten into a millionaire who is the Tramp's friend when drunk but does not recognize him when sober.[15]

Chaplin officially began pre-production of the film in May 1928 and hired Australian art director Henry Clive to design the sets that summer. Chaplin eventually cast Clive in the role of the millionaire. Although the film was originally set in Paris, the art direction is inspired by a mix of several cities. Robert Sherwood said that "it is a weird city, with confusing resemblances to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangiers and Council Bluffs. It is no city on earth and it is all cities."[16]

On August 28, 1928, Chaplin's mother Hannah Chaplin died at the age of 63. Chaplin was distraught for several weeks and pre-production did not resume until mid fall of 1928.[17] Psychologist Stephen Weissman has hypothesized that City Lights is highly autobiographical, with the blind girl representing Chaplin's mother, while the drunken millionaire represents Chaplin's father.[18] Weissman also compared many of the film's sets with locations from Chaplin's real childhood, such as the statue in the opening scene resembling St. Mark's Church on Kennington Park Road[19] and Chaplin referring to the waterfront set as the Thames Embankment.[20]

Chaplin had interviewed several actresses to play the blind flower girl but was unimpressed with them all. While seeing a film shoot with bathing women in a Santa Monica beach, he found a casual acquaintance, Virginia Cherrill. Cherrill waved and asked if she would ever get the chance to work with him.[21] After a series of poor auditions from other actresses, Chaplin eventually invited her to do a screen test.[22] She was the first actress to subtly and convincingly act blind on camera due to her near-sightedness,[23] and Cherrill signed a contract on November 1, 1928.[24]

Filming for City Lights officially began on December 27, 1928, after Chaplin and Carr had worked on the script for almost an entire year.[24] On the set, Chaplin was noted for doing many more "takes" than other directors at the time.[25] Production began with the first scene at the flower stand where the Little Tramp first meets the Blind Flower Girl. The scene took weeks to shoot, and Chaplin first began to have second thoughts about casting Cherrill. Years later, Cherrill said, "I never liked Charlie and he never liked me."[26] In his autobiography, Chaplin took responsibility for his on-set tensions with Cherrill, blaming the stress of making the film for the conflict. "I had worked myself into a neurotic state of wanting perfection", he remembered.[27][26] Filming the scene continued until February 1929 and again for ten days in early April before Chaplin put the scene aside to be filmed later.[28] He then shot the opening scene of the Little Tramp waking up in a newly unveiled public statue. This scene involved up to 380 extras and was especially stressful for Chaplin to shoot.[28] During this part of shooting, construction was being done at Chaplin Studios because the city of Los Angeles had decided to widen La Brea Avenue and Chaplin was forced to move several buildings away from the road.[29][30]

Chaplin then shot the sequence where the Little Tramp first meets the millionaire and prevents him from committing suicide.[29] During filming, Henry Clive suddenly decided that he did not want to jump into the tank of cold water in the scene, causing Chaplin to storm off the set and fire Clive. He was quickly replaced by Harry Myers, who Chaplin had known while under contract at Keystone Studios. Chaplin finished shooting the sequence on July 29, 1929, with exteriors at Pasadena Bridge.[31] Chaplin then shot a sequence that was eventually cut from the film involving the Little Tramp attempting to retrieve a stick that was stuck in a grate. The scene included a young Charles Lederer; Chaplin later praised the scene, but insisted that it needed to be cut.[32] He then continued filming the scenes with the millionaire until September 29, 1929.[33]

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