Today on TCM, some of Charlie Chaplin’s later films (City Lights, Modern Times, and Limelight) fill the afternoon. Chaplin is a figure in cinema history whose fascination for me has more to do with his personal life than his movies. His movies, many of them masterpieces, are nonetheless broken up into such jarringly different phases that appreciating his film catalog from start to finish almost requires multiple sensibilities working against each other at once. It’s not just that he went from silents to sound, many film artists did that. It’s that he went from slapstick one-reelers to full length silent comedies to full length melodramatic comedies still defiantly silent in the sound era to talkies to star driven vehicles (Countess from Hong Kong) all within the course of a single career. Making it even more jarring is the fact that Chaplin’s visual style changed little, if at all, from The Great Dictator to Countess. He never seemed entirely comfortable in the sound era and Limelight, more than any of his other sound films, seems desperate to return to the good old days when silence was golden.
Limelight is an odd movie, one that I don’t particularly care for while, at the same time, recommend it to anyone who is a student of Chaplin or silent film. That’s because, in every frame of this movie, there’s a silent movie screaming to get out. It’s a perfect example of what a movie would look like if made by a director who learned his craft in the age of silent shorts and was suddenly moved through time to the sound era and told to include dialogue. Watching it one gets the feeling that, whatever Chaplin had been doing in the previous 24 years since sound on film became all the rage, it wasn’t watching sound movies. Limelight is not a bad film by any means but it has almost no feel whatsoever for sound film.
The movie begins with the camera moving down a hallway towards a door and then, inside the room, towards a bed with a lifeless body, that of Claire Bloom, the oven open and a bottle of pills in her hand. It is one of the only times the camera moves for the entire running time of the movie. We then cut to an older man, Calvero (Charlie Chaplin), showing up at the front stoop of the apartment building that contains the apartment of Claire Bloom, where he lives as well. It’s here, after the suicide reveal that Chaplin spends a minute or so doing a bit of “too drunk to get the key in the door” shtick that seems oddly placed to say the least. Of course, it plays as a bit of business one would see in a silent comedy and the almost complete lack of foley work (ambient sound in the scenes in which sound effects of the surroundings are added in post-production) makes every Chaplin routine seem like something from a silent movie, but without the accompanying music audiences were used to from piano players or orchestras or organists that gave the routines their drive.
Once inside the building he smells the gas, breaks down the door, and goes to get a doctor. Again, all of this is done in remarkably quiet surroundings. No street noise is heard, no chatter, no horses clopping down the street (it takes place in 1914). And then, once Bloom wakes up, Chaplin goes into a strange chastisement of her condition via a brief discourse on the evolution of stars, including our own sun. If it doesn’t seem at all like something a drunken has-been named Calvero would rant on about, you’re right, it doesn’t. It sounds like something Charlie Chaplin would rant on about instead. Which makes the whole scene feel disconnected at once from the nostalgic universe Chaplin has placed it in.
The story follows a course that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to a fan of City Lights, though it doesn’t follow the same plot, it has many similar elements, including suicide, eviction, and mis-matched romance. There’s a sentimentality to City Lights that works perfectly in the silent world and could just as easily work well in the sound world as well, but with Chaplin at the helm, the movie wants to be a silent, only it has to contend with sound. This results in several long stage performances of Calvero that interject the film, with the unintentional function of effectively stopping the film dead in its tracks rather than keep things moving along. It’s curious that a pantomime talent as extraordinary as Chaplin would waste so much time on a flea circus bit that is as physically unremarkable as it is dreadfully paced. Even at the end, when Chaplin finally joins forces with Buster Keaton for an all-out physical comedy stage skit between the two, the result is underwhelming at best. Chaplin doesn’t have Keaton really doing much of anything that Keaton excelled at except pointing and gesturing and falling off a piano stool. And the odd decision to play each scene onstage without letting the movie audience hear the theater audience is a head-scratcher. Only at the end of each stage performance do we ever hear the audience watching them, for a brief few seconds of laughter and applause. I’m no fan of laugh tracks but hearing the audience here would have been the natural option to go with and probably made things more lively. But again, Chaplin seemed determined to keep the film as silent as he possibly could without actually making it a silent film.
Outside of Countess from Hong Kong, this is my least favorite Chaplin movie but one that fascinates me as much as almost anything else he ever did. If you want to understand the genius of Chaplin, you need to watch his shorts from the teens and early twenties. That is where you will encounter the talent that became a legend. If you want to see Chaplin’s best feature length work, I would go with everything up to Modern Times. After that there’s some good (The Great Dictator) and bad (Countess from Hong Kong) but all of it with a feel that the man behind the camera felt uneasy and uncomfortable with all of it. Chaplin’s sound career, but especially Limelight, always felt like the work of a man who was never quite sure how the new technology worked and fought against it without ever fully turning his back on it. I contend that if he had made Limelight a silent film, a true silent film, like City Lights, it would have been far more successful. When you watch it, it’s clear it wants to be a silent film. If only Chaplin had realized that, or let himself admit it.