As an opening title card informs us, Limelight is the story of a ballerina and a clown. The clown is Chaplin’s Calvero, an aging musical hall performer whose immense popularity has slowly but steadily deteriorated to the point that he can no longer connect with his audience and has not worked in more than a year. In that time Calvero has turned to alcohol, first as a means of building up the courage to go on stage and be funny, but lately as a means of blotting out his failed career. In the film’s opening scene he returns drunkenly to the boarding house in which he is renting a room and serendipitously saves Terry (Claire Bloom), a young ballerina who has just moved into a room downstairs, from a suicide attempt. With no one else to care for her, Calvero takes Terry in and helps rehabilitate her both physically and mentally, restoring in her the courage to perform. In the process, he regains his own courage and attempts to stage a comeback, which is met with decidedly less success than Terry’s quick ascension to the top of London’s ballet scene.

When Chaplin cast Claire Bloom, who was only 20 at the time, she was already a well-regarded stage actor, although she had never been before a camera. You wouldn’t know it from her performance, which is delicate and nuanced in conveying Terry’s deep depression and loss of identity, as well as her exuberance when she rediscovers her art. Chaplin is also excellent in his first completely dramatic performance. While he plays the clown onstage—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes badly—off-stage his character is defined primarily by a deep well of sadness that is barely masked by his forced optimism. Some of the film’s most poignant scenes depict Calvero alone, lost in thoughts of his own failure, particularly a scene in which he wipes away his makeup after a particularly disastrous night and one in which he sits backstage torn between the happiness and envy he feels toward Terry’s newfound success as the lights around him are shut off, eventually leaving him in literal and metaphorical darkness.

Being a product of the early 1950s, Limelight is awash in overtly Freudian suggestions about hysteria and psychosomatic paralysis that today feel a bit clunky and overly dramatic, but are still necessary to the film’s fundamental narrative about not just redemption, but the literal resuscitation of life via reclaiming one’s art. The fact that Calvero is part of the music hall scene, a low art form, while Terry is a dancer in the ballet, a high art form, allows Chaplin to merge the two and demonstrate how all art has its place (the film’s use of London’s famous Empire Theater reinforces this notion, as it regularly played both vaudeville and ballets during the 1910s). Throughout the film are lengthy sequences in which the narrative effectively pauses so we can watch Calvero singing a funny ditty about the benefits of being a sardine or Terry dancing a ballet. Both have their place.

Part of the beauty of Limelight is the way Chaplin uses his aging, down-and-out clown to save a young life from slipping into the abyss. Calvero finds his own sense of self by guiding Terry back to hers, and there is something lovely in their exchanges, which Calvero insists remain purely platonic even though Terry eventually confesses that she is in love with the much older man and wants him to marry her. Whether this is out of pity, affection, or genuine romantic love is never made entirely clear, but what is never in doubt is that Calvero and Terry share a deep connection that is perhaps most moving because it remains fundamentally undefined.

As good as it is, Limelight can be seen as something of a retreat for Chaplin into the comfortable realm of pathos and sentimentality following his previous two films, the daring Hitler satire The Great Dictator (1940), which was made at a time when no one in Hollywood would touch the topic of Germany and the war in Europe, and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a scathing black comedy about a serial killer who preys on wealthy widows that was not particularly well received and resulted in a dip in Chaplin’s seemingly unshakeable mass popularity. It is not surprising, then, that Chaplin would retreat back to more audience-friendly subject matter and tone, although he still continued to stretch his artistic bounds by making Limelight his most overtly dramatic and tragic film. There are bits of physical and verbal comedy sprinkled throughout the storyline, not just in the lengthy sequences in which Calvero performs on stage (including one in which he teams with the great Buster Keaton, the first and only time the two great silent comedians performed together on screen), but it is, on the whole, a serious dramatic exploration of melancholy and the devastating loss of one’s sense of self.

What is most striking in Limelight is the way it evokes Chaplin’s greatest fear: losing touch with his audience. Following the commercial and critical disappointment of Monsieur Verdoux, which was also his first feature-length film not to feature his iconic Little Tramp character or a close corollary, it is not hard to imagine Chaplin’s anxiety about losing his popularity, especially with the increased political pressure in the United States, where he had lived since 1914 (although he never officially became a citizen). The film’s single greatest and most heart-wrenching moment is when Calvero is alone in his bed dreaming about performing only to find that the absence of applause is due to an empty theater—the actor’s greatest nightmare. It is particularly sad, then, that the metaphorical empty theater become a reality for Limelight, as it was all but unseen in the United States during its initial release due to the State Department’s refusal to allow Chaplin to return to the country after he was accused of being a communist sympathizer and denounced on the floor of Congress. The controversy that ensued effectively swallowed the film and resulted in Chaplin taking up residence in Switzerland for the rest of his life. It would be 20 years before he returned to the U.S. to accept an honorary Oscar in 1972 for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century,” the same year that Limelight finally got a proper theatrical release.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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