Chaplin officially bade farewell to the cinema in the aptly
named Limelight (1952), going so far as to enact his own death at the
film's conclusion. Set in England in the 'teens, the film tells the story of a
has-been comedian, Calvaro, who rescues a young woman who has attempted
suicide; when she becomes a star, she first attempts to help the older man
without success and then decides to sacrifice her own career for his sake,
realizing she loves him more deeply than her young, attractive suitor. The
film has obvious autobiographical traits, most conspicuously in the parallel
between the film's romance and Chaplin's own marriage to Oona O'Neill but in many
other details as well, particularly the tantalizing similarities between
Chaplin and Calvaro. (Chaplin himself suggests the similarities through the
names, which not only both begin with "C" but also contain the same
number of letters.) Like Chaplin himself, Calvaro alternates in the movie
between an offstage persona--played by the mature Chaplin--and an onstage one
that resembles the classic "Charlie" figure, thematizing the split
in Chaplin's own life between the character he played on screen and his own
private life, often intruded upon by reporters, gossip columnists, and various
self-appointed guardians of public morality. Even more strikingly, the film's
action occurs at the same moment Chaplin was beginning his own rise to fame,
implying an interesting symmetry in the career of the fictional clown and the
"real" star. Although Chaplin was by no means a has-been when he
made Limelight, he may have recognized that his kind of comedy was
doomed to vanish, just as had the traditional clowning--represented by Calvaro--which
silent comedy had supplanted; Chaplin further underlines this analogy by his
casting of Buster Keaton, who like Chaplin had begun in the era of music halls
and vaudeville, but who had experienced the unfortunate fate of Calvaro in his
own life. In terms of the film's "all the world's a stage" metaphor,
established by a title at the very beginning----the film would seem to endorse
the idea that the older generation should gracefully yield the stage to the
next, just as Calvaro opportunely perishes rather than let Claire Bloom
destroy her life to care for him.