Charles Chaplin’s career continued beyond the retirement of his Little Tramp persona, but the actor-director could never leave his beloved character behind, try as he may. Despite their later reconsideration as classics, not all of Chaplin’s post-Tramp films, such as Monsieur Verdoux, were initially well-received. Limelight (1952), one of the director’s final films and the last he made in the United States, may be overlong and bogged down in melodrama, but as a backwards looking elegy for the dying days of silent cinema, it may be Chaplin’s most devastating statement.
Set in London at the beginning of World War I, Limelight features Chaplin as Calvero, a once famous comedian whose fading celebrity has left him a stumbling drunk. His hair a thicket of white, Chaplin appears startlingly older here as he staggers home to his shabby boarding house one day to find that a young girl living in an apartment beneath him has tried to kill herself. Taking the girl, an aspiring ballerina named Thereza (Claire Bloom), into his apartment, Calvero slowly rediscovers his own ambitions while helping her convalesce.
Limelight is not a feel-good story where Calvero, bolstered by the undying love of a young woman, makes a comeback in his final years. Rather, it’s Thereza whose star begins to ascend. Emboldened by her affection, Calvero refuses to go silently into the darkness of obscurity and mounts a comeback. But times and tastes have changed and there isn’t a place for a comedy hall clown. Chaplin gamely set Limelight in this milieu for a reason. While historically this is the time when the cinema began to phase out ballet and theater as the most popular means of entertainment, Chaplin is actually mourning a golden age of cinema that has been erased by dialogue and more sophisticated special effects.
As Calvero continues to flounder and realizes his career is finished, Thereza pushed him to fight for his place on the stage. Maybe it’s Chaplin who is also misguided. The comedy in his Little Tramp films has persevered and remains hilarious to this day. In flashback, Chaplin shows us Calvero at his pantomime peak, performing with an imaginary flea circus. It is hard to connect with these moments, making it difficult to see the difference between the sections where Calvero once killed audiences and his poorly received performances in the present day. None of it is particularly funny or memorable.
Thereza’s character is another problem with the film. Bloom is certainly beautiful and can dance, but she over emotes every single moment she is on screen. The actress would go on to a prosperous career, yet her character here is grating and cloying. She is devoted enough, however. After she lands the lead role in a ballet, she makes sure that Calvero is also cast in a small role as a clown, though he insists on using a different name. He bombs and almost loses his job. Thereza also proposes to marry Calvero, who refuses not only because of the massive age discrepancy but he also because doesn’t want her pity. Even though he goes along with it for a time, Calvero eventually suggests Thereza marry a young American composer (played by the actor’s son Sydney).
Calvero’s constant failure and descent can feel lugubrious in a film that runs nearly two and a half hours. Chaplin does give his character a final moment in that sought-after limelight in the movie’s waning moments. Once Thereza’s producer realizes that the flailing clown is none other than the Calvero, he commissions a retrospective gala for the legend. For one night, Calvero is back, performing to thunderous applause. It is also the film’s most famous section, featuring a sequence where Chaplin shares the screen with silent legend Buster Keaton for the first and only time. For a few glorious moments, the comedy in Limelight enters the same indelible territory as Chaplin’s heyday, even as he cedes some of the stage to his one-time rival.
“There’s something about working the streets I like,” Calvero tells a character late in the film after he is discovered busking for a living. “It’s the tramp in me, I suppose.” Chaplin is well aware that he can’t outrun his alter ego. His time in the limelight has come and gone. Like his Calvero, Chaplin circa 1952, besieged in his private life and no longer a bankable star, is a relic of the past. Upon its release, Limelight did not revive its creator’s career. It’s a fitting epitaph in many ways, a self-aware meditation on fame found and then lost, an appreciation for dying arts and a quiet farewell from one of the most beloved pioneers of cinema.