The Chaplin Collection: Volume Two

Featuring definitive, restored, and digitally remastered editions of four more Charlie Chaplin feature film masterpieces and two more "mere" classics--along with a collection of his best shorts and a superb documentary--The Chaplin Collection: Volume Two actually tops its sublime predecessor from last year in both quality and quantity. In addition to the silent comedies City Lights (a warm, funny unrequited romance, in which the Little Tramp falls for a blind flower girl--arguably Chaplin's best film), The Kid (his most famous and emotional film, in which he adopts an abandoned little boy played by the magnificent Jackie Coogan), and The Circus (the Little Tramp stumbles his way into big-top stardom with sidesplitting results), this collection also boasts the writer-director-actor-composer's most daring and novel films. In the delicious 1947 black comedy Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin abandons his known screen persona for the first time, playing a suave French serial polygamist and wife-killer. In 1957's audacious but imperfect sociopolitical satire A King in New York, he's a deposed monarch who encounters everything crass about American society from Communist witch-hunts to the early advent of tabloid television. More stunning still, in A Woman of Paris (starring lover Edna Purviance as a courtesan) he doesn't appear at all, which caused this sophisticated, cliché-free melodrama of regret, sacrifice, and sold souls to tank at the box office in 1923. Add to this mix half a dozen hilarious two-reelers, a 133-minute documentary about Chaplin's life, and an avalanche of superb supplements (including film intros by biographer David Robinson, 26-minute documentaries about each film's modern influence, outtakes, and home movies), and there's just no way you can go wrong with this spectacular box set, despite its few shortcomings--such as a lack of running times on the shorts and a few minor digital resolution anomalies (probably only noticeable on high resolution screens). Highly recommended. (R. Blackwelder)