Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights

As the cinematic rival of the stoic Buster Keaton it was Charlie Chaplin who infused his comedic work with great pathos through his perennial character of The Little Tramp. Chaplin constantly strove for that perfect balance between a lovably goofy man-child and moments of grand emotion. Never did he accomplish the blend so symmetrically and effortlessly it seems as with City Lights. It just might be his best work.

Made after the advent of synchronized soundtracks for films and at a time when studios had completely abandoned silent cinema, Chaplin insisted City Lights remained silent with respect to dialogue, retaining the custom of inter-titles because The Little Tramp was a universal character. He could be understood across cultures, across borders, across languages. Not to mention that every individual around the world who knew the character would have given him, in their own heads, a voice only they knew. To strip that all away would have been to unravel part of what made him so special.

Spanish Dracula Movie Review

Carlos Villarías uses this expression about 50 times throughout the film.

First published at Mostly Movies on 29 November 2010

It was a common practice in the early sound era for Hollywood studios to produce a second, nearly identical, version of a film in a foreign language. They were produced in Spanish, French and German most often and very few of the foreign language versions survive to this day. One of the most famous that does survive is the Spanish language version of the 1931 Tod Browning Dracula.

George Melford served as director, as was his station at Universal pictures during that period. He directed Spanish language versions of several films. According to IMDb, he neither spoke nor understood the language, but Wikipedia tells me he got the job specifically because of his knowledge of Spanish. Oh what a perfect example of how unreliable the Internet is. Ten years before Drácula he directed Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, which survives as one of the classics of silent cinema.

Classic Movie Review: Tod Browning's Dracula

What’s most striking about Tod Browning’s Dracula is how, despite being almost comically stylized by modern standards, you can still see its profound influence on horror films through the decades straight up to the present. The camera and lighting techniques were mostly still in their infancy in 1931, and (apart from Fritz Lang’s M from that same year) film makers had yet to learn how to effectively incorporate synchronized sound in a way that augments the action, but most films of the genre that have followed owe some bit of credit to Browning. That said, Dracula itself, the first official film version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, exhibits the influence of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, the 1922 German silent film that was an unsanctioned adaptation of the famous vampire story.