Where to watch City Lights (1931)

Trivia & production notes

• Charlie Chaplin decided to make City Lights as a silent film despite the industry's shift to sound, taking advantage of his position as part owner of United Artists to maintain creative control.
• Chaplin initially conceived the blind flower girl character from a circus clown story where the protagonist goes blind and must hide his condition from his daughter through elaborate physical comedy.
• The drunken millionaire character was adapted from a decades-old idea Chaplin had for a short film where two wealthy men pick up the Tramp from a city dump, treat him lavishly, then abandon him so he cannot tell if it was real.
• Virginia Cherrill was discovered at a Santa Monica beach film shoot after she casually asked Chaplin if she would ever work with him, and she was cast largely because her near-sightedness allowed her to convincingly portray blindness on camera.
• Chaplin's mother Hannah died on August 28, 1928, during pre-production, causing him to halt work for several weeks while he recovered from the loss.
• The opening flower stand scene between the Tramp and Blind Girl took weeks to film, stretching from December 1928 through February 1929, with additional reshooting in early April, causing Chaplin to doubt his casting choice.
• Henry Clive, the art director hired to design sets, was also cast as the drunken millionaire but was fired during filming when he refused to jump into a tank of cold water for a scene.
• Chaplin replaced Virginia Cherrill with Georgia Hale mid-production when Cherrill asked to leave early for a hair appointment, though he ultimately rehired Cherrill for a $75 per week salary after realizing too much footage had already been shot to reshoot all her scenes.
• A sequence was filmed showing the Little Tramp trying to retrieve a stick stuck in a grate, featuring young Charles Lederer, but Chaplin removed it from the final film despite praising the scene.
• The film's setting blends architectural elements from multiple cities including London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangiers, and Council Bluffs rather than depicting a single real location.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article City Lights, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.