Dave's Other Movie Log

davesothermovielog.com

Articles  Contents  Reviews  Guestbook

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.