Limelight (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I checked on the Turner Classic Movies Web site to see if there was a film I’d be interested in watching – and it was a quite moving classic that somehow had eluded me before. The film was Charles Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) – he was universally known as “Charlie Chaplin” but his credits always billed him as “Charles” (something I identify with because my husband always insists on being called “Charles” – calling him “Charlie” or, even worse, “Chuck” is a good way to get on his bad side) – and it’s a deeply personal movie. Only once before, in the 1928 film The Circus (which I still consider Chaplin’s most underrated work), had Chaplin laid his heart so publicly on his sleeve – and it’s significant that both The Circus and Limelight were made at particularly fraught times in Chaplin’s life and career. The Circus was made when Chaplin’s scandalous divorce from his second wife, Lita Grey, was dominating American headlines and threatening to ruin his career the way Fatty Arbuckle’s had been destroyed by rape allegations against him, and Limelight was made in the early 1950’s, when Chaplin was being hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and other U.S. government bodies over his Left-wing politics – which he’d never been particularly secret about. Indeed, after he finished the movie he went on a trip home to see his relatives and friends in his native country, Great Britain – and while he was away the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service declared him an undesirable alien and pulled his permit to re-enter the United States. Chaplin was understandably furious, not only that they’d expelled him but they’d done so when he wasn’t able to fight back. Fortunately by then he’d married his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, and as a U.S. citizen by birth she was able to return to this country and get all Chaplin’s money out of the country. Though he remained a British citizen (and after she completed her mission in the U.S. Oona renounced her American citizenship and naturalized as a Brit), he lived for the rest of his life in Vevey, Switzerland and returned to the U.S. only to accept an honorary lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1972, five years before his death.

Limelight is set in the summer of 1914, just before the start of World War I and the passing of the way of life it represents – in which, among other things, horses and early cars share the streets of London (and also the year Chaplin broke into movies after already becoming a star both in the British music halls and American vaudeville). It tells the story of Calvero (Charles Chaplin), a former music-hall star who is now washed up, barely hanging on, living in a boarding house with the usual harridan landlady (Marjorie Bennett), whose life suddenly acquires meaning and purpose again when he rescues a fellow tenant, Terry Ambrose (the young Claire Bloom in a superb performance; Chaplin attempted to launch the careers of young women but only two of his discoveries, Paulette Goddard and Bloom, became stars in their own right), from an attempted suicide. She’s both drunk poison and turned the gas on in her flat, and in an opening tracking shot – rare in a Chaplin film (Karl Struss, who’d shot Chaplin’s 1940 Nazi spoof The Great Dictator, returned as cinematographer with Chaplin’s old collaborator from the silent days, Roland Totheroh, credited as “photographic consultant”) – we discover her and see how Calvero rescues her. With the landlady having evicted her and her having no income and no other place to go, Calvero takes her in, poses as her husband and nurses her back to health. Terry becomes convinced that she’s paralyzed and can no longer even walk, let alone dance, but Calvero pressures her and finally she overcomes her psychological block and returns to the Empire Theatre ballet company.

Meanwhile Calvero attempts a comeback at a theatre in Middlesex but bombs when the entire audience walks out the first night, and now it’s Terry’s turn to nurse him back to self-confidence and mental health. She gets the leading role in a new ballet, “The Death of Columbine” (which Chaplin composed himself as a work for a British ballet company in 1950, then incorporated into this film), composed by Neville (played rather kinkily by Chaplin’s son Sydney, who would later co-star with Barbra Streisand in the original stage production of Funny Girl but would be replaced by Omar Sharif in the movie), whom Terry had helped with handouts and extra music paper from her job at a stationery store until her boss caught her and she got fired. Terry insists that Calvero get hired as one of the three clowns in her ballet, but on opening night she’s a success but he gets terrible reviews and he’s fired. Fortunately an impresario hits on the idea of giving Calvero a benefit in which various acts will pay tribute to him and he will perform in the middle, doing a sketch with an old music-hall partner and friend – played by the equally legendary Buster Keaton in the only collaboration of silent comedy’s two ruling geniuses. Neville wants to marry Terry – he’s always been in love with her since those days at the stationery store – but she wants to marry Calvero out of a mix of love and gratitude, while Calvero doesn’t want to tie her down to someone of his age. (The real-life Chaplin had no such scruples: all his wives were teenagers when he married them.) In the end Calvero has his last big success – the claque the producer had hired to laugh at his act laughs on cue, but the genuine audience laughs too – but he gets a heart attack and dies backstage.

Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that the original inspiration for Limelight was a music-hall comedian named Frank Tinney, who was a major star in London when Chaplin was just starting out; years later he saw Tinney again but by this time he was a sad, burned-out little man and he simply wasn’t funny anymore. But I suspect that as Chaplin wrote the story it took over from him and he used it as a vehicle to express his own anxieties about his career. He was just coming off the debacle of 1947’s Monsieur Verdoux, a black comedy in which he plays a con man who marries suddenly rich women and then kills them. It had been his first-ever box-office flop, at a time when his predilection for teenage girlfriends was once again in the news (in the early 1940’s he was sued for paternity by an aspiring actress named Joan Barry and was required to pay her child support even though a blood test proved he was not her child’s father) and so were his politics. The Catholic War Veterans mounted a campaign against him, denouncing him as a Communist and a draft dodger (he had served in neither world war – though one of his biographers pointed out that at 5’4” he didn’t meet the military’s minimum-height requirement – and he pointed out that both his sons by Lita Grey had served in World War II) and attacking him for never having naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Chaplin’s response to that was to say, “I am a citizen of the world. I owe no allegiance to any particular country” – anticipating the “Imagine there’s no countries” sentiment expressed by John Lennon, another British émigré to the U.S. whom the government tried (unsuccessfully, in Lennon’s case) to expel over his Left-wing politics.

Throughout Limelight Chaplin gives long speeches as Calvero reflecting on his past and wondering how and why he lost the ability to make people laugh (an angst that’s a major part of the plot of The Circus as well), and they come off as a cri de coeur that cuts through the film’s sentimentality (the biggest artistic weakness of both Chaplin and John Ford) and gives it a wrenching emotional power. Chaplin would make two more films in the remaining 25 years of his life, A King in New York (a quite marvelous wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Chaplin plays a deposed monarchy who comes to the U.S. to offer a plan for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, is hounded for his politics and ends up turning a fire-house on the House Un-American Activities Committee) and A Countess from Hong Kong (a leaden bore in which Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren starred in an ancient story Chaplin had written in the 1930’s and dredged up from his back files), but in a real way Limelight is his testament. It also, through a quirk of the eligibility rules for the Academy Awards, won for Best Musical Score in 1973 – Chaplin’s first and only competitive Oscar (though he had two honorary ones from 1928 and 1972 already) and an odd honor for a 20-year-old film, though the bittersweet score he provided fits the mood of the film perfectly and adds to its appeal. (In his autobiography Chaplin said he was often arguing with musical directors who wanted the music to be funny; he wanted to accompany his comedy with romantic music, playing against the mood of his scenes and building a sense of his character.)

Limelight has its flaws – the sentimental philosophizing does get a bit wordy (as Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff wrote, “Once Chaplin started to talk, he overdid it, including a few soliloquies”) and the scene with Keaton isn’t the comedy riot it could and should have been. It doesn’t help that Chaplin as director kept Keaton off camera during much of the routine, though there’s a marvelous line as they’re making up before the sketch in which Keaton, ever the anti-sentimentalist, says, “If one more person comes up to us and says, ‘It’s just like old times,’ I think I’ll go crazy.” (This is the man who, asked by biographer Rudi Blesh, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like Sherlock, Jr.?,” said, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic! I just wanted it to look like a dream!”) Limelight is a vivid and emotionally haunting film, and it probably means more to me at an age similar to Chaplin’s when he made it (he was 63 when he filmed Limelight, and I’m 67 now) than it would have if I’d seen it as a younger man.