15 Silent Films That Changed Cinema Forever

2. City Lights (1931) By 1931, silent film was dead. With the release of The Jazz Singer 1927, the Sound Age had begun. Hollywood changed almost overnight and all anyone wanted to watch was the talkies. Charlie Chaplin though, insisted that his tramp character would lose his magic if he spoke and against all odds, four years into the sound age, Chaplin made one of his most memorable films. City Lights is probably the most "Chaplin-y" of all Chaplin's movies, it contains the melodrama, pathos, gags, and the happy ending that define almost all of his work. In City Lights, Chaplin created some of his most memorable scenes; the opening where Chaplin gets stuck on a statue, the scene where he saves a drunk millionaire from drowning, and of course the iconic final scene that is widely considered one of the great tear-jerking moments in film. City Lights did not introduce any cinematic innovations or contain anything "new" but it did what it set out to do better than almost any other film and its reputation has grown ever since its release. Orson Welles called it his favorite film, both Kubrick and Tarkovsky placed it in their top ten, Woody Allen drew from its ending while filming Manhattan, and in most circles it is considered not only Chaplin's best but one of the best movies of any kind ever made.