Limelight (1952) - film review

London, 1914.   Calvero, a once famous comedian of the music hall, is unable to find work and drowns his sorrows in drink.  One day, whilst staggering drunkenly to his rooms, he smells gas.   To his alarm, he discovers that one of his neighbours, a young woman named Thereza, has tried to commit suicide.  Calvero arrives just in time to save her and takes her up to his room, much to the chagrin of his landlady.  When Thereza regains consciousness, she rebukes Calvero for saving her.  She was until recently a promising ballet dancer but a sudden rheumatic illness has brought an abrupt end to her career.  Calvero soon realises that Thereza’s condition is psychological not physical and encourages her to return to her profession.  Her self-confidence restored, Thereza becomes a great success and is soon touring the world.  But what of poor old Calvero?  Audiences no longer laugh at his jokes.  He is just a pathetic old man.  He has had his time...

Limelight is the film in which Charles Chaplin looked back with nostalgia to his vaudeville past and forward with sadness to his decline and final curtain call.  The last film he made in America, this is Chaplin at his most revealing and most autobiographical.  Like the central character in the story, a faded star of the music hall, Chaplin knew that his best days were behind him and he felt that his audience had deserted him.  He had become the burnt out relic of a once great entertainer and now he was facing a bleak and uncertain future, playing to empty theatres in which the only laughs would be echoes from the past.  

Whilst he was making Limelight, Chaplin became the most high profile victim of McCarthyism.   His previous film, Monsieur Verdoux, had earned him the reputation of a Communist sympathiser.  This, coupled with his reluctance to apply for US citizenship and his frequent writings on quasi-Communist alternatives to capitalism, made Chaplin an obvious target for the vociferous anti-Red brigade, who sought to have him expelled from the country.

In contrast to Chaplin’s three previous feature films, Limelight had no political subtext, but, thanks to the concerted efforts of the McCarthyist paranoiacs, it was released in only a handful of cinemas in America.  When Chaplin went to London to attend a gala premiere of the film, his return visa was revoked and he was denied re-entry into the United States.  Chaplin’s long association with the country in which he had found fame and fortune and had become a screen icon ended in bitterness and rejection.

It is reported that whilst making Limelight Chaplin was convinced (no doubt because of the failure of Monsieur Verdoux) that this would be his last film.  This would explain why it is such a personal affair.  The setting is the London he knew when he was a child and adolescent – crammed boarding houses, music halls and widespread poverty.   The character Calvero resembles Chaplin’s own father – a performer who became an alcoholic when he lost his talent and his audiences.  Thereza is modelled on Chaplin’s mother and his first love, Hetty Kelly.  There is a particular poignancy in the way that Chaplin relates his own personal experiences and anticipated decline to the tragic fortunes of his own family.  The wheel had turned full circle.

Tellingly, Chaplin cast several members of his own family in the film.  The lovelorn composer Neville is played by his second born son Sydney, whilst his eldest son Charles Jr. appears briefly as a clown.  Three of his children from his marriage to Oona O’Neill also appear in one short scene, including Geraldine Chaplin in her first speaking role.  This is also the only occasion when Chaplin appeared alongside another comedy legend, Buster Keaton.   Chaplin gave Keaton the role when he learned he had fallen on hard times, having lost most of his fortune.  The Chaplin-Keaton double act at the end of the film is its comedic highpoint and provides a welcome relief from the overplayed self-pitying schmaltz which weighs the film down in its second half.  

Playing Chaplin’s co-star is the then unknown 19 year-old English actress, Claire Bloom.  A promising stage actress, Bloom had made her film debut in The Blind Goddess (1948) and would enjoy a long and high profile career on stage, film and television, best remembered for her portrayal of Lady Marchmain in the landmark British TV serial Brideshead Revisited (1981).  Bloom’s vitality and inexperience made her an ideal apprentice for Chaplin, and it is the warmth of their on-screen rapport that makes Limelight so memorable and so moving, in spite of some awkward sentimentality.

The screenplay was developed from a (as yet unpublished) novel that Chaplin wrote over a two year-period.  The film was shot in just 55 days, in stark contrast to Chaplin’s earlier feature films in which the actor-director would devote several weeks to perfecting individual scenes.   Chaplin not only wrote, directed and starred in the film.  He also choreographed the dances and composed the score (arguably his best).  The score was awarded an Oscar in 1973, following the film’s first nationwide release in America in 1972.

Limelight may have been conceived as Chaplin’s swan song, but it was not the end for Chaplin.  Although his days in Hollywood were over, he would go on to make two further films in England – A King in New York (1957) and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967).  Like Calvero, Chaplin was determined not to just fade away but to continue finding new ways to entertain audiences.  Some would question whether he succeeded but his resolve not to give in, to remain active and tap his artistic talents for as long as possible, is an inspiration to us all.

© James Travers 2009

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