Charlie Chaplin Boxed Set

Collecting Chaplin's best feature-length classics, this boxed set includes the following "Little Tramp" (mis)adventures: The Gold Rush (1925/1942), which finds our hero battling the elements, mad miners, and a broken heart in the Yukon, and features the timeless sequences of the dance of the rolls, eating shoe leather, and the topsy-turvy cabin on the cliff (unfortunately, this is Chaplin's re-edited, narration-added 1942 version, rather than the 1925 intertitled silent original); City Lights (1931), the hilariously poignant story of the Little Tramp's love for a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill); and Modern Times (1936), in which Chaplin fights the twin evils of (first) techno-stress and (next) unemployment. The final disc, The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin's first "talkie," features the comic genius in a brilliant spoof of Hitler. The DVD transfers on all four films are fairly sharp considering the age of the originals, and each disc contains a few extras, such as interviews, production notes, and newsreel footage. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)