Limelight (1952) review
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton playing street artists long past their prime
In Limelight (1952) Charlie Chaplin interprets a somewhat exaggerated version of himself: comedy and vaudeville legend Calvero, who’s prime has passed and now, an old poor drunk, yet wise, is forced to the streets again, striving for a penny. A sad story? Not for a street artist at heart, like Chaplin, who rejoices in this alter-ego. At one time he says, “There’s something about working the streets I like; it’s the tramp in me I suppose”.
The silent days of cinema are gone; the heyday of the circus and vaudeville are also gone. And yet there’s something about the clown, the street artist, half-way between a child and a grown person, something in his jolly pantomimes, in the unnatural grimaces, in the strange and masterful gestures–– something that speaks more eloquently and universally about life than any novel of ideas or grand opera could. The man’s then and there, his body is his art, giving himself away to the world, utterly exposed to its laughter, cheering, booing. Life's a pantomime.
Like Prospero in the epilogue of Tempest, Chaplin offers us a most faint Calvero, his charms o’erthrown, entirely in the hands of his audience’s indulgence. His project? To please… The simplest of all projects and, perhaps, the most difficult. Life’s beaten hard on him, and he’s got nothing, except a stubborn and unbreakable faith in that old whimsical mistress called life: which he will redeem with art. Limelight is not Chaplin’s last movie, but it could well be: a final eulogy – death on the stage.
Indeed, no one in the history of cinema has exposed himself so thoroughly to so many like Charlie Chaplin. He not only directed and acted, but composed the scores, wrote the scripts and produced most of his films. He also created and run the company (United Artists) which made them. He probably swept the damn sets. He was his films. When he comes on screen he's giving us everything he has.
Chaplin’s Little Tramp, a creature from and of the streets, a troublemaker with a heart of gold, was his political manifesto for a radical, sentimentalist democracy. The sad Calvero, a failed comedian and a has-been, which proves himself to be invincible in his life-affirming spirit, is his manifesto for a life-redeeming art. Cheesy? It would be with anyone – perhaps even Dickens; but not with Chaplin. Again, something about that tramp in him, the street artist, which allows him to convey the simplest, and most naïve, of philosophies and have the whole world cheer, even the cynicals.
