Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17373 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-09-22
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 11
• Running time: 724 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This Chaplin Collection DVD box set contains the following films, also available separately:

The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952).

Full details can be found in our Chaplin Collection feature.

There are also two films exclusive to this box set: A Woman of Paris (1923) and A King in New York (1957), plus the documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin--see DVD Description below.

DVD Description
Contains the following eight films:

• The Great Dictator
  
• Modern Times
  
• The Gold Rush
  
• Limelight
  
• The Kid
  
• Monsieur Verdoux
  
• The Circus
  
• City Lights

Also contains the following bonus features:

• A Woman of Paris
  The legendary silent movie of manners, mores and morals, A Woman of Paris was the first Charlie Chaplin film in which he did not appear. Marie St. Clair (Edna Purviance) believes she has been jilted by her artist fiancé Jean (Carl Miller) when he fails to meet her at the railway station. She goes off to Paris alone. A year later, mistress of wealthy Pierre Revel, (Adolphe Menjou) she meets Jean again. Misinterpreting events she bounces back and forth between apparent security and true love.
  
• A King in New York
  Charlie Chaplin's penultimate film - featuring his final starring performance - was made in 1957 but wasn't officially released in America until the '70s, when it, surprisingly enough, won an Oscar for Chaplin's score. What took so long? Thanks to his politics and unorthodox personal life, Chaplin was pretty roundly hated by the late '50s. Chaplin plays King Shahdov of Estrovia, on the run when revolution grips his homeland. In New York, despite the occasional indignity, he's treated as royalty until he takes a stand against the commie-hunters, a plot line that hit way too close to home at the time (Chaplin, remember, was ahead of everyone in attacking Hitler when he made The Great Dictator).
  
• Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
  Richard Schickel's new documentary Charlie chronicles Charles Chaplin's brilliant career as an actor, writer, director, producer and composer as well as his controversial and much publicised private life - his love affairs and four marriages, his paternity suit scandal and persecution by the FBI, culminating in a self-imposed exile from the United States. With its brilliant observations, rare footage interwoven with scenes from Chaplin's greatest films and a remarkable series of newly recorded interviews, Charlie is the definitive documentary overview of Chaplin and his Little Tramp. Among the long list of actors, friends and family paying tribute are Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Robert Downey JR, Milos Forman, Sir Richard Attenborough, Geraldine, Michael and Sydney Chaplin.

Special Features
Region 2

Customer Reviews

Superlative
I bought this some time ago and I have only just finished viewing it. It is a superb piece of work by all who contributed to restoring the prints, I cannot believe the quality of each and every disc. I also cannot believe people who say that they could not stand Chaplin as they found him unfunny. These features are not just funny they are social commentaries of the time. I loved Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton but they could not keep the laughs up for an hour or an hour and a half, therefore they mainly stuck to two reelers for the laughs, anyone who watches these features expecting to laugh for 90 minutes should steer clear and maybe stick to the Marx Brothers who had the love interest for 75% of their movies to pad them out.

classic comedy by the master himself.
great news to see all charlie chaplin's feature films on dvd.as a bonus, released for the first time on any format in the U.K are two films that are quite obscure: "a woman of paris" and "king in new york." i haven't seen them yet.
as for the rest, each film has at least one famous sequence which lingers in the mind long afterwards. my favourite films in the collection are "the gold rush," "the kid," "modern times" and "city lights."
the special features are plenty: screen tests, trailers, documentaries about each film, short films and even chaplin being filmed on the set directing a key sequence from "city lights." that in itself is a rarity.
and last but not least, is a 2 hour documentary about chaplin. again, i haven't seen this yet.
endlessly, there has always been a debate over who was superior out of chaplin or buster keaton. as far as i'm concerned, it is too close to call but i prefer chaplin by a narrow margin.
purchase this box of delights ,and be solidly entertained for hours on end.

A Beautiful Collection 100 Years In The Making!
I fell in love with Charlie Chaplin at the age of 10, and it has been a lifelong love affair.

So you can imagine the sheer delight when I received this handsome box set in the mail from Amazon. The press release stated the set will allow you to "experience the wonder, the laughter, the magic and the genius of the world's first superstar in a way no audience has experienced them before" and there's nothing more truthful. For the first time we have all of Chaplin's major feature films together, along with an unprecedented treasure trove of special features. MK2's obvious passion for Chaplin comes shining through with these stunning restorations and their neatly presented documentaries. Really, the films are in absolutely pristine condition. The quality of the prints- specifically with The Kid and A Woman of Paris- give no hint that they are over 80 years old. (Someone in an earlier review commented that they look as though they have been shot yesterday, and that is no exaggeration.)

And as with all DVDs, there are plenty of extras that make for endless hours of entertainment and (more commonly) education. For Chaplin fans, the extras are a dream come true because we finally get to see what we've only read about for years: The famous home movie Nice and Friendly with Lord and Lady Mountbatten, his 1918 film How to Make Movies showing the building of the Chaplin Studios on La Brea Avenue, the original 1925 SILENT VERSION of The Gold Rush with the original ending which must have been painstaking to restore, the brilliant deleted scene for The Circus with Charlie and Rex on a lunch date with Merna, another brilliant outtake for City Lights with Charlie's attempt to get a bit of wood out of a grate in the sidewalk, **twenty-five** fascinating minutes of COLOR behind-the-scenes footage from the shooting of The Great Dictator, and there's literally HOURS more where that came from.
Also included is the very well done Schickel documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin. It's full of Hollywood heavyweights (Narrated by the great Sydney Pollack!) including Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese, Milos Forman, Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Geraldine Chaplin, Sir Richard Attenborough- even Marcel Marceau! It spans his entire career from Keystone to Vevey and is a fair, honest and lovingly tended biography of this timeless genius. The documentary concludes with the words "he was a flawed man. . . that is to say, he was human. . . with the uncanny ability to reflect humanity back at us. . ."
Those are indeed fitting closing words to a lovely documentary, in an exceptional Box set for this remarkable man.