Limelight Review

• 4th Apr 2011

Although the drama is very bleak and emotionally powerful, the story of Limelight is a culmination of Chaplin’s entire career and has more than a smidgen of his own autobiography in it. It recalls the streets of his childhood in London, his music hall background with the Fred Karno Company and Vaudeville. The film opens with Chaplin’s atypical sentimental score that harks back to the soundtracks to his earlier films and opens with a panned shot of a London street in the summer of 1914 on the eve of the First World War. However, these are not the streets Chaplin would have experienced growing up in his youth in Walworth, Lambeth and along the Old Kent Road, but of a marginally more respectful neighbourhood. On the street a barrel organ is playing evoking the Edwardian pre-war period, before the camera pans into an apartment building where we see a young girl lying on the bed in her lodgings having switched on the gas in a suicide attempt. Enter Chaplin as a rather drunk, out of work Vaudeville actor called Calvero, in which we first see him in his drunk state trying to put his key in the front door of the same apartment building while taunted by street kids (in fact his own kids: Geraldine, Josephine and Michael). Here we see the kind of comedy we associate with Chaplin employing as his tramp. Don’t be fooled though, this is not a comedy, but a drama with comedic tics and twitches. When he enters he can smell gas and at first he thinks it is himself that he smells and checks his clothes and under his shoes, when he realises it is coming from the ground floor room; he kicks the door down, saves the girl and with the help of a doctor he takes the girl up to his room without the suspicious landlady from seeing. When she eventually recovers, Calvero makes the false assumption that the girl, Terry (played by a young Claire Bloom) is a prostitute. Calvero’s line of questioning at the time is quite daring here, brushing close to the censorship laws. He helps the girl recover in his lodgings, much to the consternation of the landlady. What unfolds is that Terry is a failed ballerina and the unlikely pair build an emotional crutch for each other and in turn help the other regain their self-confidence both on and off the stage. It is only when the young ballerina meets a younger man that their dynamic is threatened with the resultant fear of failure both in love and on the stage is pervasive throughout the film in both Calvero and Terry.

Limelight returns to the theme of the clown and the stage with Calvero’s stage character not too great a departure from the little tramp. One of the films failings is that Chaplin’s voice can grate after a while but the end result is only a slightly flawed masterpiece. His silent contemporaries fared less well than Chaplin, with Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton failing in the transition from silent to talkie picture. Keaton appears here, though, in his greatest on-screen role for some twenty-five years as Calvero’s stage partner in the film’s best moments, with particular mention going to the violent violin and piano sketch and the death scene.

On its release, Chaplin stated that Limelight was not a political film, yet that did not prevent his detractors from witch hunting over his misguided support of Stalin. To get away from the furore, Chaplin decided the film should be premiered in London and so departed, with his family, for the UK. While he was away, the US government would prevent Chaplin from re-entering the United States, making this his last Hollywood film and beginning his exile in Europe and, in my opinion, his last quality film.

Released for the first time on Blu-ray, this would not be a film worth watching for any non-Chaplin fans, but for those who admire him and his art this sentimental and dark drama is a culmination of his entire career.

Chris Hick