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By PAUL BRENNER
To expand upon a phrase --
when a director dies, he becomes a photographer;
when a comedian dies, he becomes a pompous
windbag. In Charles Chaplin's elegiac tribute to
himself, "Limelight" (now available on a two-disc
special edition from Warner Home Entertainment as
part of The Chaplin Collection), Chaplin plays a
washed up "tramp comic" who befriends Terry, a
suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom), motivating and
exhorting her to throw off her insecurities and
become a star. Or, as the opening title card
states, "The glamour of limelight, from which age
must pass as youth enters." If this were not a
Chaplin movie, the ballerina, listening to
Calvero's pretentious homilies, epigrams, and
self-help tips -- "Life is desire, not meaning"
and "The heart and mind, what an enigma" are but a
few of the trunk full -- would end up becoming
more suicidal than ever. The audience, put in the
place of Terry, is compelled to bask in the benign
glow of Chaplin's aura as he attempts to self-pity
his way into our hearts and livers. In a sense,
though, Chaplin's tiresome self-hagiography is
deserved, considering the greatness of Chaplin's
past work; if anyone ever deserved to be an
egomaniac it would be Chaplin. But as Calvero
drones on and on about fickle audiences, engages
in bitter self references, and haughtily cuts off
his philosophical musings, we can certainly
understand Terry when she remarks, "To hear you
talk, no one would ever begin to think you were a
comedian." Even Buster Keaton, who appears all too
briefly at the end of the film, remarks to
Calvero/Chaplin, "I never thought we'd come to
this."
The one thing that saves "Limelight" from being
132 minutes of laudanum is also Chaplin. Not his
grandstanding performance or his constricted
direction, but his pure passion. Chaplin's passion
-- for film, for art, for comedy, for himself --
rides roughshod over the seemingly insurmountable
obstacles of id, making "Limelight" not only worth
seeing but intimately moving. Chaplin's emotional
turbulence makes the audience feel Chaplin's soul.
When Chaplin imagines a showstopping music hall
performance only to realize he is performing to an
empty theater, the pained shock of the revelation
in Chaplin's eyes is searing. And, as if the
preceding 130 minutes were not clue enough, when
Calvero succumbs backstage at the end of the film
and the material used to cover Calvero's body is a
screen, we now know for sure: in "Limelight" we
have witnessed the death of Chaplin.
The second disc features a fascinating array of
extras including an introduction by Chaplin
biographer David Robinson, a documentary on
"Limelight" with comments by Bernardo Bertolucci,
a deleted scene, the isolated music score (a
moving score composed by Chaplin), extracts from
"Footlights" (a novel written by Chaplin as the
basis for "Limelight"), "The Professor" (an
unfinished short from 1919 that resurfaces in
Calvero's music hall routines), home movies of
Chaplin and his family from 1952 and 1959,
trailers, a poster gallery, and scenes from other
Chaplin films. |
