In Chaplin’s Limelight Nathan Glick finds a work of art that looks back in fond memory to the past of the movies-that past which is so dominated by the figure of Chaplin himself—and draws from it a depth and a sweetness that is seldom present today. 

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Chaplin’s Limelight celebrates old fashions. In terms of craft, it invokes the English music-hall comedy style on which Chaplin was nurtured as a boy, and the silent film slapstick that made him famous and rich. On the personal level, it is an egocentric study of ripening age and decaying talent, of the dignity and humiliations, nightmares and daydreams of old age. And for once Chaplin’s Jewish heritage is visible, in the sweet and contemplative old man’s style, in the self-pity and self-mockery, in the idea of sacrificing the old for the young.

Those-who expected Charlie the Tramp, quixotic, rebellious, and unquenchable, were disappointed, and most of the American reviews expressed this disappointment. Nor did the smaller group that admired the sardonic verve of Monsieur Verdoux find an extension of that vein. Chaplin’s mood in Limelight is a kind of ruminative piety, a brooding, generous, but distant tolerance which sometimes overflows into sentimentality, but more often skirts and evades it by a hairsbreadth. What the film loses in vitality through the absence of conflict or villain, it gains through its delight in the vulgar, its talk of worms, fleas, sardines, and skunks. And it is finally saved as a work of art by its refusal to use external means—music, tricky lighting, camera work, or editing—to force emotions on the spectator. Chaplin’s still camera and silent sound track in the intense emotional scenes create a film style which resembles Tolstoy’s plain prose.

Limelight makes clear, by contrast, how much of serious modern movie-making depends on a nervous, excitable, always traveling camera. A myth has been circulating since the coming of the talkies, that sound has driven movement off the screen. Actually films today are not more static, but more jittery, than silent movies. If the actors move less, the camera moves a great deal more. In Limelight, however, the camera returns to the modest place it had in silent days. It is secondary, not only to the actors, but more crucially to the director’s imagination. Chaplin solves the problem of audience interest in the classic rather than the modern manner. He chooses his scenes with immense care and then allows the action to unfold. The camera is not wielded like a pennant of high art, but as an instrument for revealing the scene, simply and tactfully. Chaplin’s camera strategy brings us up short. We have become so accustomed to the neurotic camera that we are unprepared for the forgotten pleasures of a plain film style.

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Chaplin’s technique in Limelight represents an almost pure distillation of early silent-movie style. Its graceful stiffness is nicely suited to Chaplin’s portrayal of Calvero, an elderly vaudeville comedian in search of a “sad dignity” which might reconcile him to failure. The source of Calvero’s dignity, like that of the Tramp’s, is an irrepressible realism that plays its jokes on an equally irrepressible romanticism. And this double vision bathes the film, even at its most poignant moments, in ironies both subtle and broad. At the height of his peroration on the life impulse, Calvero exhorts the suicidal young ballerina: “Life can be wonderful if you’re not afraid of it. All you need is courage, imagination. . . .” Then he adds: “and a little dough.” The afterthought is not so much cynicism as an effort to be just. Later in the film the comedian is soliciting contributions in a pub for his band of street musicians, when he is recognized by an acquaintance who is about to drop a coin into his hat. Calvero interrupts the exchange of amenities to insist on the release of the coin. “Now where were we?” he continues debonairly.

Chaplin’s successful accumulation of a personal fortune has not, apparently, wiped out the memory of early lean days, or the folklore of hard-gotten cash associated with those days. This concern with money and making a living is one of the main sources of Chaplin’s appeal. His characters are always insecurely in the center of the working world. But Chaplin makes this insecurity of economics and ego bearable by his burlesque of the powerful and successful, and by his own example of grace under stress: by the Tramp’s fastidiousness in rags, Calvero’s jauntiness in failure. Chaplin shares to a degree the sentimentalism endemic in the entertainment industry, but where this feeling usually represents the somewhat maudlin and superstitious effort of the currently successful to buy off disaster, with Chaplin it seems to derive from an authentic, if paradoxical, identification with the underdog.

The film is full of amateur philosophy, mainly Chaplin’s romantic naturalism, which regards desire as the source of all vitality and death as the end of desire. As always, Chaplin hedges his commonplaces with unexpected reversals. Thus in the conflict between the generations, it is youth that is pessimistic, and age optimistic: the young ballerina attempts suicide, and the failing, aging clown talks eloquently of the life impulse. But the philosophizing in Limelight is only a disguise for the more personal statement contained in the detail of plot and pantomime. Although the picture fades on the ballerina triumphantly whirling on stage, after Calvero has died in the wings, youth serves actually as a backdrop for an elderly man’s search for an identity outside his function.

Chaplin himself, of course, is neither rundown nor a failure, but like Calvero he has been criticized for having lost the capacity to make people laugh, and for taking an improper interest in young women. In earlier years, he might have responded with an anarchist scorn of mass opinion and social convention. Limelight shows him in a more responsive and reflective mood, shorn of bravado, tactful, willing to compromise. He is not interested, as he was, for example, in The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux, in winning arguments, but in finding a stance appropriate to his years and independent of his success or failure as a performer. In the early scenes of Limelight, Calvero seems to have found a modus vivendi: a dapper exterior and alcohol enables him to face society, and dreams of past glories occupy his night life. But under the stimulus of the ballerina’s presence he returns to the two obsessions of his life: success in his craft and involvement with women.

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For Chaplin on the screen, women have always been the objects of gallantry, sentimentality, or (when middle-aged and lusty) burlesque. As a screen lover, he is no Byron, but something of a proletarian Rossetti. The young ballerina in Limelight is another of Chaplin’s idealized women, a sleeping beauty revived by an act of compassion. The fact that there is no impression of sensuality or salaciousness in her living in the comedian’s room is hardly explained by the latter’s remark that he has reached the age where he can conduct a Platonic relation on the “highest plane.” Not senility but a romantic storybook nostalgia guides Chaplin’s treatment of this relationship. In film after film, Chaplin has played middle-aged variations on the adolescent daydream. Where the adolescent dreams of heroism and victory, Chaplin envisions heroism and defeat. In City Lights, the Tramp befriends and restores sight to a blind flower girl, who does not learn her benefactor’s identity until it is too late: he too old and seedy, she too full of life. The professional Take of Monsieur Verdoux and the retired clown of Limelight persist in Chaplin’s daydream of middle age. Each takes in a girl who despairs of life before her time, inspires her, and then goes to his own death.

But Limelight represents, in one respect, a variation of the theme. It is the first Chaplin film in which this sacrificial romance between age and youth becomes reciprocal. Chaplin has conceived a “pure” romance, without sexual innuendo or psychoanalytic semantics, but nonetheless real both as art and as human possibility. Its persuasiveness is at least partly due to the choice of Claire Bloom for the role of the ballerina. No actress in my memory has registered fairy-tale emotions with such naturalness. “You are excruciatingly funny,” she tells Calvero to cheer him up, but with a tone and expression of heartfelt anguish. True, the character she plays is uncomplicated. Outside his own roles, Chaplin shows a better sense of types than of individuals: his supporting characters have integrity but not depth. But within that limitation, Miss Bloom’s responsiveness is startling. It allows her to do something rare for a young movie actress: to give the impression of actually considering another person’s remarks. The long passages of talk between Calvero and the girl early in the film are justified not by any verbal brilliance—although the dialogue is more than usually witty, poetic, intense, and direct—but by the play of facial expressions that accompanies the talk. The oval, tactful, innocent face of Claire Bloom makes a striking obligato to the mobile, wrinkled, experience – dented, unmasked Chaplin. Chaplin converts speech itself into a form of pantomime, with the words chosen like gestures to create a mood or introduce a movement.

The romantic temper of Limelight extends beyond the central relationship to the film’s cursory scenes: theater movement, backstage and vestibule; a haggard young composer spending his last coin on music sheets; even the shot of the littered backyards of a London slum, intended as an ironic undertone to Calvero’s exhortation, is touched with poetry. There is a passage in Limelight quite peripheral to the plot line, in which the ballerina comes back to the rooming house after a midnight performance and finds Calvero playing a quartet along with some impoverished street musicians. The effect of this scene is not ridicule, even though the music is played with beery soulfulness and a bit out of tune, but rather an affirmation that the love of art is a source of grace. Chaplin has caught something of the emotional state in which young people discover poetry and music, like reading Wordsworth’s “Immortality” ode or hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the first time.

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Limelight represents for Chaplin an act of remembrance and celebration, and the film culminates fittingly in a collaboration between Chaplin and Buster Keaton, one of the forgotten comic geniuses of silent movies. Their earlier rivalry no longer counts against their present roles as witnesses to another age and a purer craft. In this violin-piano duet, Chaplin pays his respects to silent-film slapstick by reducing that art to its skeletal structure, with a minimum of props and almost dead silence. William Whitebait (in the New Statesman and Nation) has observed that the skit is as exhilarating as a Bach fugue. The comparison is startlingly apt. The counterpoint of Chaplin’s volatile, devilishly smiling mask against Keaton’s mild, unmoving, dour façade builds up to a climax in which the perfection of form becomes a kind of mad ecstasy. In passages like this Limelight equals anything seen on the screen, including Chaplin’s own earlier work. For the rest, it is simply one of the few eccentric, felt, and moving experiences in twenty-five years of talking pictures.

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