Limelight

The Auteurs

By Jonathon Saia

Limelight (UA, 1952) – Director: Charles Chaplin. Writer: Charles Chaplin (original story and s/p). Stars:  Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Nigel Bruce, Buster Keaton, Sydney Chaplin, Norman Lloyd, Andre Eglevsky, Melissa Hayden, Marjorie Bennett, Wheeler Dryden, Barry Bernard, Stapleton Kent, Cyril Delevanti, Molly Glessing, Leonard Mudie & Loyal Underwood. B&W, 137 minutes.

“My name is Calvero. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

“But you’re not the great comedian?”

“I was.”

I.

By 1952, the year Limelight was released, Charles Chaplin had been an international star and the most famous symbol of the film industry for almost 40 years. Even today – 103 years after he made his film debut in the comedy short, Making a Living – the image of Chaplin’s Tramp, complete with signature bowler hat, cane, and mustache, is synonymous with Hollywood and remains one of its undisputed giants. Not only as a performer, but as a world class director with many of his films showing up on national and international lists of the greatest films, not just comedies, of all time. Six of his films have been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry; a record tied by Alfred Hitchcock and bested only by Billy Wilder and Walt Disney; The Circus (1928) won him a Special Oscar, and in 1972, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.”

So how was it that he became one of the most hated men in America, exiled from the shores of a country he called home for half a century? Before his fall, first a word on his rise.

Born in 1889 in London, Chaplin got his start early in the theatre. His parents, Hannah and Charles, Sr., were successful vaudevillians. One evening during her performance, Hannah lost her voice. At the behest of the manager and his mother, five-year-old Charles Jr. entered, mocking her laryngitis for laughs and collecting the coins at his feet. Hannah never regained her voice and Charles Sr. was already moved on to another family, so after a few years in squalor, Chaplin and his brother were sent to the workhouse; a milieu that would influence the very best of his future films. Hannah descended into madness and Charles Sr. into drink. At eight, Chaplin joined a clog dancing troupe called the Eight Lancashire Lads to help support his destitute mother. 

During his time with the Eight Lancashire Lads, Chaplin honed his comedic and theatrical talents in a variety of music halls and vaudeville houses, performing with the likes of Marceline (a Spanish clown who eventually committed suicide when he became relegated to Ringling Brothers and “the vulgar extravagance of a three-ring circus”), Zarmo (a comedy tramp juggler who practiced bits for hours before each show), and the Griffith Brothers (comedy trapeze clowns). Once the tour was over, he helped out his mother anyway he could, working a variety of odd jobs: receptionist (which included such demoralizing tasks as emptying the urine from toilets), pageboy, glassblower, a printing assistant, and making toy boats. By the age of twelve, Chaplin’s father had drank himself to death, his brother had gone off to the military, and their mother was admitted to an asylum. Chaplin lived for a time on the kindness of strangers. 

Throughout this Dickensian childhood, he also would visit agent’s offices, asking if they needed any boy actors. He finally got his break with productions of Sherlock Holmes and Jim, the Romance of a Cockney. Sydney, newly returned from service with theatrical aspirations of his own, served as his business manager; a role he would serve during Chaplin’s film career. Chaplin would tour in a variety of theatrical outfits over the next few years, most famously with Fred Karno, the forerunner of slapstick comedy; Karno would eventually go to work for Hal Roach Studios. It was Karno who brought Chaplin to America in 1910. Three years later, Chaplin was spotted by Mack Sennett (or his representatives; reports vary) and hired to join Keystone. 

Professional tensions were high at Keystone between Chaplin and Sennett almost from the start. Though a novice at filmmaking, Chaplin’s experience doing years of pantomime comedy on the road (most famously playing a drunk; a role he would play numerous times for Sennett and all the way up until Limelight) gave him a confidence in how he could and should be funny and wanted to direct his own films. Keystone’s break-neck speed and chronic mantra of “No time!” inhibited Chaplin’s creativity. Films were made and released in mere days and there was “no time!” to waste on what Sennett or other directors deemed as superfluous business, causing altercations. One such film, Mabel at the Wheel (1914) saw Chaplin even boycott his director when he felt that she – his co-star, Keystone’s biggest draw, and the boss’s main squeeze, Mabel Normand – didn’t know what she was doing behind the camera and refused to work until she would listen to his gags. Sennett planned to fire him, but Charlie implored Sennett to allow him to direct himself against a $1500 salary. To Chaplin’s surprise, Sennett acquiesced. Years later he discovered that Sennett had gotten word from the New York office how popular Chaplin’s films were on the East Coast and decided he was too profitable to lose. With a few notable exceptions such as The Fatal Mallet and Tillie’s Punctured Romance (both directed by Mack Sennett, 1914), Chaplin’s films at Keystone were under his own direction, the stand out of these being The Rounders (1914) where fellow Keystone star Roscoe Arbuckle and Chaplin play, once again, drunks. 

It was Keystone where Chaplin introduced to audiences – in only his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) – the character that would cement him into cinema lore: The Little Tramp. 

Chaplin’s body of work is not united by technical prowess; he saw no value in wasting time on camera set ups, continuity, or lighting. It is not united by brilliant dialogue; all of his films before The Great Dictator (1940) – even complicated melodramas like A Woman of Paris (1923) or masterworks like Police (1916), A Dog’s Life (1918), The Circus (1928), and Modern Times (1935) – were begun without finished screenplays and had evolving scenarios designed around a series of gags, a technique he learned from his days with Sennett. Chaplin’s oeuvre is united by the character of The Little Tramp: the vagabond hustler with a heart of gold who refused to let society beat him. He’s an Everyman without family and the perennial victim of unrequited love who, with the exceptions of Modern Times and A Dog’s Life, would wander into the distance at film’s end alone as the iris closed in on his never ending journey for happiness and a place he could call his home. He would play this character – or a variation of it – in over sixty films. 

The signature look of his famous character came by inspired happenstance. Trying to find his voice at Keystone, Chaplin was searching for a funny look to match:

“I had no idea what makeup to put on. However, I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy (some have claimed they were Arbuckle’s), the coat tight, the hat small, and the shoes large. I was undecided to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him. And by the time I reached the stage, he was fully born.” 

The beauty and the success of The Little Tramp lies within Chaplin’s empathy for the common man, something he experienced first hand during his days in the workhouse, his nights on the streets, and his many years on the road playing to a wide swath of social strata. The Tramp gave a voice and dignity to a variety of blue collar professions and working class experiences: 

• Dental Assistant (Laughing Gas, 1914)
• Farm Hand (Sunnyside, 1919)
• Laborer (Work, 1915; Pay Day, 1922)
• Janitor (The New Janitor, 1914; The Bank, 1915)
• Police Officer (Easy Street, 1917)
• Fireman (The Fireman, 1916)
• Waiter (Dough and Dynamite, 1914; Caught in a Cabaret, 1914; The Rink, 1916) 
• Barber (The Great Dictator, though some have disputed whether this constitutes as The Little Tramp)
• Soldier (Shoulder Arms, 1918)
• Immigrant (The Immigrant, 1917)
• Prisoner, Thief, and/or Ex-Con (Twenty Minutes of Love, 1914; Police; The Adventurer, 1917; The Pilgrim, 1923; Modern Times)

...and in some of his most notable and best films:

• The Poor and/or Homeless (The Tramp, 1915; The Vagabond, 1916; A Dog’s Life; The Idle Class, 1921; The Kid, 1921; The Circus; City Lights, 1931)

Chaplin’s success at Keystone with The Little Tramp afforded him the luxury of increasingly lucrative contracts with other studios: 

– Essanay, where he made the first homage to his music hall days A Night in the Show (1915, some 35 years before Limelight) and two of the first examples where he infused pathos to the comedy, The Tramp and Police; 

– Mutual, where he gives a drunken solo performance in the extraordinary One A.M. (1916); 

– First National, where he was built his own Chaplin Studios – that are still standing on La Brea and Sunset Blvd. as The Jim Henson Studios – and made his best short films, A Dog’s Life, Shoulder Arms, The Idle Class, and The Professor (1919, an unfinished film that he would incorporate into Limelight) as well as his first feature, The Kid. 

His success also afforded him complete control of his product. Time and money were no object. Now working in a self-contained studio under United Artists (the first independent production and distribution company run by performers; including friends Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith), he was essentially a one-man-band (actor, director, writer, producer, editor, and composer), his films were cheap to make and the returns great. He employed a stock troop of actors to which he would dictate performances, including at various times his off-screen leading ladies Edna Purviance, Lita Grey, and Paulette Goddard. 

Much like Zarmo, the tramp juggler he toured with as a youth, Chaplin spent hours – days, months – perfecting bits. The famous Meet Cute between the Tramp and the Blind Girl in City Lights and the tight rope sequence with the monkeys in The Circus were both shot hundreds of times, estimates as high as 700 for the former; a scene that lasts less than five minutes on screen. Chaplin, the forebear to the freedom of John Cassavetes and Orson Welles, produced all of his features from A Woman in Paris to Limelight with unprecedented and unchallenged power.  

Yet by 1952, Charles Chaplin, once the richest and most well known celebrity – maybe even the most well known person – on the planet; friend to movie stars, tycoons, political leaders, and activists; had become persona non grata in the United States. To understand this, we must understand Chaplin’s politics and the time in which his fall occurred. 

Despite living in the United States since 1910 and clearly making his money from its consumers, Chaplin had refused to become an American citizen, referring to himself as a “citizen of the world” during a time when national identity, particularly political identity was of the utmost importance: the McCarthy Era. The idea of being a “world citizen” drew ire throughout his life and career. First during WWI when he did not enlist in either the American or the British armies; then during Modern Times and The Great Dictator when some saw the story of the former and the final speech of the latter with so-called Communist dog whistle buzz words like “universal brotherhood” as criticisms on capitalism (which they were). Chaplin sympathized with the U.S.S.R. in the Second World War for “holding down the front and bringing a considerable amount of fighting and dying to bring victory to the Allies (which it did). Through a meeting with Gandhi early in his career, Chaplin learned to see the dehumanizing effects of machines. One could argue that Chaplin’s “Communist” sympathies date back to the very beginnings of his career as we covered earlier in The Tramp’s many working class misadventures. But the peak of Chaplin’s Communist hysteria occurred with the release of his criticism of nuclear proliferation and war profiteering, Monsieur Verdoux (1947); his most biting satire of American culture up until the scathing A King in New York (1957). 

Between these two films, Chaplin made Limelight, his most autobiographical, and possibly his greatest, film. And while it doesn’t explicitly deal with his then current political troubles – he would leave that to A King in New York – Limelight deals with the origins of his fame, his mother’s insanity, his father’s alcoholism, and most pointedly, his relationship with the audience that once loved and had now abandoned him. 

II.

Limelight opens with the epigraph, “The glamour of limelight from which age must pass as youth enters. A story of a ballerina and a clown.” Both statements could refer to Chaplin’s own feelings about his career. His star was fading with age; his comedy long described as balletic, even by the great Nijinsky. 

The setting is 1914 London, roughly 20 years past when Chaplin would have been a boy in these streets. He recreated his childhood neighborhood on the Chaplin backlot for authenticity and even cast his own young children, Geraldine, Michael, and Josephine as the neighborhood kids for a bit of symbolism. 

We first meet the seemingly dead body of Terry (Bloom in her first starring film role), sprawled out on her bed clutching a bottle of something ominous. Breaking from Chaplin’s apathy toward camera movements (perhaps it was his new cinematographer Karl Struss’ influence), we get a great sequence of “pure cinema” as Hitchcock would call it: the camera dollies from Terry’s comatose face to the bottle to the open oven to the towel under her door. She has clearly tried to commit suicide. 

Meanwhile, Calvero (Chaplin) stumbles home to his apartment. It is midday, yet he is already drunk. Immediately, we are keyed in that this man is separate from the normal routines of society. Even the kids don’t seem to notice anything amiss with the drunken man. Perhaps they are used to him. 

Once inside (after a fun piece of business trying to get his key in the lock), Calvero goes to light a cigar in the foyer. He smells gas coming from the nearby apartment. He notices a handkerchief stuffed in a hole in the door (a clever touch to show the ramshackle nature of the complex as well as the steps Terry took to kill herself). Calvero removes the scarf, peers through to find an unconscious girl, and breaks down the door. He and the nearby doctor, ironically the one who sold her the poison, carry her up to Calvero’s room. They stabilize her and decide not to call the police; apparently attempting suicide was a criminal offense in 1914 London, and Terry would have gone to jail for her failure. 

Calvero convinces the landlady, Mrs. Alsop (Bennett), not to throw Terry out (after many months of thinking she was a streetwalker). Terry will convalesce in Calvero’s room and in order to avoid scandal, pretend they are man and wife.   

Terry awakens in disappointment to find herself alive; Calvero chastises her for her suicide attempt:

“Billions of years it’s taken to evolve human consciousness and you want to wipe it out. Wipe out the miracle of existence.” Chaplin as Calvero could very well be airing his own fears over nuclear annihilation.

That night, we get the first sense of the man Calvero is – or used to be – in his dream. He performs at a music hall, a flea circus routine. Chaplin had been trying to get this into one of his films since 1919’s unfinished The Professor, contemplating and then cutting it from The Circus and The Great Dictator. It’s a fun scene and shows off Chaplin’s gift for pantomime beautifully. When Calvero/Chaplin looks out to the audience, he sees that he is playing to an empty house. He awakens in fright.  

Over the next few days of convalescence, Terry confesses her suicide attempt was not gonorrhea related as Calvero and Mrs. Alsop imagined, but over her failure as a dancer, hard on her luck and depressed over the rheumatic fever that made her quit the ballet and the “utter futility of existence, all life without meaning.” Calvero retorts, “Life is a desire, not a meaning.” Chaplin as Calvero is tipping a nod to his own belief system; a nihilist who eschewed religion at an early age when he saw his mother turn to it at the beginning of their poverty – and her descent into madness. Terry learns that Calvero is – or used to be – the Great Calvero, famed clown of the Music Hall. Though it’s curious how she could have missed it. The walls, by no means as stifling as the Grand Guignol shrine to Norma Desmond, are covered in his photos and giant posters that bear his name; billed as “a tramp comedian in his extensive repertoire.” We also learn of Calvero’s backstory and the sad role that alcohol has played in his demise:

“As a man gets on in years, he wants to live deeply. A feeling of sad dignity comes upon him and that’s fatal for a comic. I lost contact with the audience. I couldn’t warm up to them.”

“What a sad business being funny.”

“Very sad – especially when they don’t laugh. But it’s a thrill when they do. To look out there and see them all laughing. To hear the roar go up; waves of laughter coming at you.”

Chaplin liked to claim that Calvero was based on the life and downfall of Frank Tinney, a vaudevillian who lost favor with his audience after being accused of beating his mistress; the more obvious parallel would be his father, Charles, Sr. who drank himself to death. With the disastrous reception to Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin obviously had enough inspiration from his own life to know what it felt like “when they don’t laugh.” Yet if Tinney were an inspiration, Chaplin definitely could relate to being destroyed by marital scandals, himself involved in a highly publicized divorce from second wife Lita Grey and a subsequent paternity suit with a crazed fan, Joan Barry. 

Terry has been struck with “paralysis” in her legs. Calvero and the doctor shrug it off as hysteria (perhaps a nod to Chaplin’s mother and her bouts of insanity) imagined due to her deep rooted shame over her sister’s prostitution that once paid for her dance lessons. She thinks of dancing and imagines her sister...well, earning the money. A conceit this heavy handed might ruin a lesser picture, but Bloom and Chaplin pull off the melodrama with aplomb. Bloom definitely teeters the line of believability at times, but knowing Chaplin’s methods of dictating the performances he wanted from actors at least assures us that this was the level of intensity he desired. This scene also includes an extended flashback to Terry’s post-ballet life and her would-be love affair with a shy, young musician (played by Chaplin’s son, Sydney).  

Calvero gets word from his long silent agent; finally a booking. “This is the turning point!” But is discouraged when he finds out that it is only as a favor to the agent. His name is poison:

“Well, if my name is poison to them, I’ll go under another name.”   

He begins to help her “walk” again and finally plays his long awaited booking in secret – and bombs. He is fired after the first performance. Home in tears, Terry encourages him with the same gusto he has shown her and walks. She is cured.

Six months later, Terry has returned to the chorus of the ballet; Calvero begins drinking himself to death. They still live as “man and wife” though there is no evidence that they are physically intimate. Terry claims she loves him, but he knows it is just pity. She gets him a part in the new ballet, Harlequinade, a fitting ballet for this story with the theme of love and loss between clowns. Calvero/Chaplin will naturally play the clown. 

At her audition for the lead role of Columbine (which seems highly unlikely only being with the company for six months; maybe Chaplin was trying to mirror his own meteoric rise to fame), Calvero finally sees her dance and is saddened by her greatness:

“You’re a true artist.” He knows his time has passed. Terry begs him to marry her. He turns her down. She has nailed her audition and gets the lead. 

Coincidentally, the piano player for her audition turns out to be….Neville, the shy, young musician she once knew. They bond and as Calvero predicted begin to fall in love. 

Terry’s opening night success is too much for Calvero. As she runs into his arms, screaming his name, Chaplin plays this moment beautifully, Calvero’s excitement, pride, embarrassment, and jealousy all resting in the awkward grin across his heavily made up face. He avoids her opening night party and goes to get drunk instead at a place where men will know of his former glory. Returning home, he overhears Terry and Neville professing their love for one another. 

The final indignity occurs the next day en route to rehearsal. We learn that the producer of the show, Mr. Postant (Bruce) wants to fire “that clown,” not knowing it is The Great Calvero under another name; a talent he once fostered and produced at the height of his fame. It’s unclear why he should be fired. For us, he is more than capable in his brief ballet scenes and supplies the requisite humor one could imagine for a death bed scene. Perhaps Chaplin played it too well and should have sacrificed the beauty of the ballet to sell this point better. Calvero runs into his would-be replacement, Griffin (Delevanti) – once a contemporary of Calvero’s during their heyday –  on way to his audition. Calvero discovers he is to be replaced. He wishes him well and leaves the theatre for good.

Terry returns home to find a note from Calvero and an empty home, the markings of where his photos and posters used to be, staining the walls. We are reminded of the first instance of Chaplin wandering into the distance alone from The Tramp. In that short, we see The Little Tramp’s illiteracy in the note, “I thort your kindness was love but it aint cause I seen him goodbye xx”, mirroring Calvero’s embarrassment with losing his job, losing his girl, and most of all losing his audience. Chaplin is smart not to show Calvero’s exit down the lonely dirt road. Though he is not playing The Little Tramp in Limelight, Chaplin’s identification with this character is so absolute that the imagery is almost subconscious. 

But since Limelight is commentary on Chaplin’s legacy, it is only fitting that The Little Tramp deserves his denouement. We catch up with Calvero, hustling on the street, singing with some of his old cronies. Panhandling in a nearby bar, he runs into Neville, who fills him in on Terry, and Mr. Postant, who wants to offer him a job. Calvero refuses his pity and exits on a great line that further ties the film back to Chaplin:

“There’s something about working the streets I like. It’s the tramp in me, I suppose.”

Shortly thereafter, Terry rushes to his side and convinces him to take Mr. Postant up on his offer, a charity benefit in his honor. One last hurrah for The Great Calvero. Chaplin had imagined Limelight would be his final film and intended to go out with a bang. And the final scenes in his “final” film would do just that. 

The benefit takes up the last 20 minutes or so of the film and becomes a milestone in cinema history for bringing together the two greatest clowns of the silent – or perhaps any – era: Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Their stars rose parallel to one another, with Roscoe Arbuckle as an axis point, but the two titans had never appeared on screen together. While Chaplin’s star and independence grew and flourished, Keaton’s diminished in the sound era. Once an autonomous filmmaker, he lost creative control after signing a contract with MGM in 1928 and floundered in a series of lackluster productions, writing jokes for the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton, and descending into alcoholism. In the 1950s, he had the beginnings of a renaissance, due to a new generation discovering his work through television and cameos in films like Sunset Blvd. (1950) and eventually co-starring roles in, sadly, Annette Funicello’s beach films of the 1960s. Keaton’s first line in Limelight could sum up the whole of his later life:

“I never thought we’d come to this….”

Chaplin and Keaton perform a great musical pantomime; though Chaplin, never forgetting that it was his movie, lingers the edit more on Calvero than “Calvero’s Partner” (Keaton’s character doesn’t even get a name) and Keaton’s comedy mostly supports Chaplin’s instead of standing on its own. The shots separate them for the most part and are in line with the style of the rest of the film (standard close ups and medium shots) rather than what could have been a great homage to their silent pasts in making the entire scene one master shot of business. Chaplin also kept Keaton from wearing his iconic pork-pie hat in the final frames of the film, perhaps fearing the audience would be distracted by what Chaplin imagined would be his last moments on screen.

Despite doctor’s orders, Calvero has continued to drink. He knows tonight must be a success, knows he must be drunk in order to be funny, and that it is his last chance to prove he still has it and secure his legacy. At the end of their performance, Calvero has a heart attack. As he lay dying in the wings, Terry dances her solo, fulfilling the film’s epigraph: 

“Age must pass as youth enters.”

Chaplin has passed the baton to the younger generation. 

III.

Deluged with Anti-Chaplin Mania and given the autobiographical nature and setting of the film Limelight opened in London. But when the Chaplins left for England, the United States revoked his reentry visa, barring Charles Chaplin from reentering America. 

Had Chaplin been allowed to retire peacefully in America, he might have followed Keaton’s path to television: making appearances on a variety of shows and re-releasing his films to America’s living rooms; however, it’s doubtful that he would have appeared in anything as lackluster and undignified as Beach Blanket Bingo…

Instead, Chaplin went on to make two more films over a ten year span: the aforementioned A King in New York, his take on Communist hysteria in America and the threat of nuclear war; and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), a light comedy of manners aboard a cruise ship, starring Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, and Tippi Hedren. He attempted to make a third film, The Freak, starring his daughter Victoria as a girl who sprouts wings (seemingly fashioned on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis), but she decided to run away and join the circus instead. Chaplin abandoned the film and focused on doing restrospectives of his work around the world and writing new scores to his films; due to a moratorium on Chaplin’s films post-Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight had never opened in the United States. When it was finally released in 1973, it won the Oscar for Best Score.

In 1972, Chaplin finally returned to America for the first time since his exile. Lincoln Center Film Society in New York and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles were both honoring him with a retrospective and a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, respectively. After receiving a one-minute standing ovation, he answered this in kind:

“Thank you so much. This is such an emotional moment for me and words seem so futile, so feeble.”

From the greatest clown in cinema, truer words were never spoken. 

Charles Chaplin died of a stroke at his home in Switzerland on Christmas Day in 1977. 

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I highly recommend David Robinson’s excellent biography Chaplin: His Life and Art. It supplies much more illuminating information about Chaplin’s filmmaking then Chaplin’s own My Autobiography, which focuses mainly on business deals and his personal adventures with the likes of Fairbanks, Pickford, Hearst, Hoover, Churchill, and Gandhi; yet avoids much of his marital bliss (and discord). Other sources include the documentary series Chaplin Today and The Chaplin Puzzle, which includes the restoration of one his best works, Police. I watched nearly 40 Chaplin films for this article – and have many more to go; the trouble with writing about prolific people. But if you were to watch only five Chaplin films in addition to Limelight, you would be hard pressed to do better than Modern Times, The Circus, A Dog’s Life, One A.M., and what Chaplin thought  was “the best thing I’ve ever done,” Police.