Limelight
Terry: I thought you hated the theater?
Calvero: I also hate the sight of blood, but it’s in my veins.
The story is simple. Calvero, a clown and a drunk, stumbles into his building one day and smells a gas leak just as he’s about to light his cigar. He breaks down the door to the apartment where the leak is coming from and finds Terry, a suicidal prima-ballerina, lying unconscious on the bed. Calvero saves her life despite his drunkenness and over the months that follow Calvero discovers that Terry is, simply put, insane. She is so afraid to live that she has convinced herself to have series of crippling diseases that prevent her from going on, literally. She has psychosomatically convinced herself that she is paralyzed and can never dance again. Calvero will have none of it, first with inspirational speechifying and later with fierce physical brutality he commands her to live. It is this relationship which is the impetus for Terry’s recuperation and triumphant return to the stage. Through flashbacks and their interactions we discover that Calvero was a successful clown and an alcoholic who believed the only way to be funny was to be drunk. His fast life led to a heart attack and rejection from his once adoring audience. He too must recover and find the courage to be great once more.
From the first few minutes of the film we know we are in strange territory. Limelight is a talkie, Charlie Chaplin speaks. If you have never heard him speak, he has a gentle accent and overall pleasant voice.
The film is also dramatic. It deals with suicide, death, and failure. Long gone are the days of the Tramp. Chaplin however uses similar techniques as in his earlier successes to create the comedy in Limelight. Chaplin’s Tramp was about contrast. He was a bum who was also elegant and refined. He’ll eat his boot but he’ll do it with class. It was this game between the reality of poverty and the uselessness of manners that allowed Chaplin to offer his most poignant critiques and create brilliant comedic moments. In Limelight the contrasts are between Clown and Ballerina. Terry, played by the gorgeous Clair Bloom, is young and delicate. Calvero is the polar opposite (Chaplin was 63 when the film was made). It goes beyond age and looks though, her disposition as someone who is so willing to give everything up despite her opportunities makes Calvero’s desperation to cling onto life all the more meaningful, funny, and touching.
Limelight is not without its flaws. Bloom stage acts throughout the film offering no subtlety. The script is over written leaving nothing unsaid. And the scenario is melodramatic making the combination deadly by today’s
standards. What keeps it from collapsing is Chaplin who gives a quiet, nuanced, and personal performance. It might be clichéd to say, but when Chaplin is silent he is his most powerful. There is a moment in the film, right after he’s given a terrible performance and the crowd has walked out on him, when he looks in the mirror and you know he realizes that there’s no getting back from this. It’s quiet, reserved, underplayed and terrific storytelling.
This film must also be informed by its history as there is much beyond the text. Limelight was shot in 1952. By that time Chaplin had undergone a series of scandals that had made his relationship with audiences difficult. His social leanings, exacerbated by the 
speech in The Great Dictator (featured above), also drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. According to many not only was Chaplin a pervert who slept with women half his age and fathered bastard children, he was also a communist. By 1952 the most famous’ man in the world had fallen from grace, the audience had left him, and on September 19, 1952 as Chaplin traveled to England, the US Attorney General revoked Chaplin’s permit to re-enter the United States where he had lived since 1914. He was an outcast, banished, much like Calvero’s failed clown, a comparison that is both apt and obvious.
The tragedy of it all is that despite this being Chaplin’s least political film it was banned in the United States and lost for two decades. It was released in 1972 and Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar for the score. He would return to the United States in 1973 to accept the AMPAS Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sometimes a Good Notion 