The Chaplin Collection, Vol. 2 (City Lights / The Circus / The Kid / A King in New York / A Woman of Paris / Monsieur Verdoux / The Chaplin Revue / Charlie - The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin)

Great purchase for a lovely DVD set of Chaplin's collection. My family loves to watch them. Beautifully done, clear image, clear soundtrack, one of a kind.

Warner Brothers' "The Chaplin Collection Volume 2" gathers together numerous films from the career of one of the few cinematic geniuses. The best of the films, "City Lights," is a masterpiece of comic timing, and also features a truly engrossing love story. "The Circus" and "The Kid" are also marvelously funny and touching classics. "The Chaplin Revue," which gathers several of his short films is more of a mixed bag, but the better shorts (like "Shoulder Arms" and "A Dog's Life") are still excellent. "A Woman of Paris" is an interesting dramatic experiment, and "Monsieur Verdoux," while uneven, certainly has its moments. The only truly terrible movie in the box is "A King in New York," but it is, at the very least, an interesting document of Chaplin's views on the America that disowned him.
Like in the previous bozed set, the films look very good. Mastered from near perfect source material, the only problem is the occasional fuzziness that occurs during scenes with much movement. The sound is adequate on the 'talkies,' and fine with the musical scores on the silent films.
The set is truly impressive with its huge quantity of extras. Each of the films contains an analytical documentary "Chaplin Today," with a different international filmmaker discussing each movie (Jim Jarmusch on "A King in New York" and Peter Lord on "City Lights," for example). The discs also include introductions by David Robinson, a Chaplin biographer, which are packed with information. In addition to trailers and photo galleries, there are numerous historical curios as well, ranging from footage from the premiere of "The Circus" to newsreel footage of Chaplin in London to footage of Chaplin signing the United Artists contract to a full length Jackie 'The Kid' Coogan film. Suffice to say, Chaplin fans are going to enjoy the extras.
The problem with the set is its sloppiness. For example, the 2-disc double feature of "A Woman of Paris" and "A King in New York" has the discs incorrectly labeled (ie the "King in New York" disc is labeled "Woman of Paris"). The same problem goes for the 2-disc "Chaplin Revue." The menus are extremely ugly, the chapter links page takes a very long time to go through, and the FBI warning is in about a kajillion different languages - and no skip option.
The set also includes Richard Schikel's dry by illuminating documentary "Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin," which includes interviews with Richard Attenborough, Geraldine Chaplin, Woody Allen, Andrew Sarris, David Robinson, Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Martin Scorsese, and many more. Definately worth watching.

The Good: I'm not a complete Chaplin aficionado but I believe if you pick up this DVD set and the first Chaplin DVD collection, you'll have all his films with the exception of his early Essanay and Mutual films and his 1967 film "A Countess From Hong Kong" which Chaplin directed and features a brief cameo. Besides the films themselves, this set contains photo galleries, trailers, brief documentaries, deleted scenes, some brief but fascinating introductions by Chaplin biographer David Robinson, and other related materials - all of them presented in pristine, and in most cases stunning, condition by restoration artists MK2.

The Bad: Chaplin re-released many of these films in the '60s and '70s and the Chaplin family obviously considers these as the final word since they've included them here. I'm assuming this is a good thing because it would allow MK2 to work from newer prints rather than the old film masters from the '20s and '30s. Unfortunately, Chaplin also added new music in many cases and made some minor scene deletions. I haven't seen the earliest versions to be able to compare musical scores. And the scores used here worked fine for me. Still, it would've been nice if they included the original film instead of tacking the brief deleted scenes on separately. This was done perfectly with "The Gold Rush" set in the first Chaplin DVD collection which includes the original film and the reworked modern version with Chaplin's narration. There are several spelling mistakes on the packaging of "The Kid" - the title has dropped out somewhere along the line in its production - an error which should've been caught, considering all the care they've put into this package. There are also some isolated spelling mistakes in the title cards during "The Chaplin Revue" shorts they could've easily caught. The "Woman" disc lists that it includes movie posters on the box's contents - however, they've forgot to include them here. The box is also rather flimsy paperboard. I recently bought the Monty Python boxed set which comes in a hard cardboard box. This is another minor point but it would've been nice to get a solid housing considering the cost of this set and care put into the materials. In addition, the FBI warnings on all the movies and documentaries appear for about five minutes in several languages - which is fine - but unfortunately, you can't fast forward through any of them. The only thing you can do is stop the DVD and reboot to get back to the main menu or wait the warnings out until the menu comes back. This inconvenience could've been corrected as well.

The Ugly: In their haste to put this thing out, possibly to coincide with the current Jeffrey Vance coffee table book "Chaplin - Genius of the Cinema," they've made a few glaring errors. In the case of the A King in New York / A Woman of Paris two disc set, both discs work properly - but they've been mislabelled. (Disc One is actually Disc Two and vice versa.) I purchased this set in Canada at HMV so this is not strictly an issue with the sets Amazon are selling. What's worse is they've also made the same mistake with "The Chaplin Revue" two disc set. Again, both discs play fine but are mislabelled. These sloppy errors will probably be corrected in future print runs. But it's such a bonehead mistake - particularly making them twice in one collection - they really should've caught them.

But all in all, even these minor points still can't obscure the fact this is a really phenomenal DVD set with all the prime, sublime glory of Chaplin. You just wish they hadn't been asleep at the switch with all these careless little errors.