Limelight (1951)

Limelight (1951): written and directed by Charles Chaplin; starring Charles Chaplin (Calvero), Claire Bloom (Thereza), Sydney Chaplin (Neville), Nigel Bruce (Postant), Buster Keaton (Cameo), and Norman Lloyd (Bodalink): Limelight won Charlie Chaplin an Oscar for Best Score 22 years after its release because Oscar rules at the time stated that a movie cannot be nominated for an Oscar unless it plays for at least one week in a theatre in Los Angeles. Chaplin had been exiled from America by the time of Limelight, alleged to be both a Communist and a statutory rapist several times over.

Boy, though, Limelight is a sentimental, speechifying, melodramatic, self-indulgent bore. The great Chaplin dragged his heels when it came to making full-sound pictures -- The Great Dictator (1940) was his first film with dialogue throughout. Chaplin with sound is... well, increasingly dire. The Great Dictator comes to a screeching halt as it concludes with what only feels like a 9-hour speech from Chaplin's character about world peace and all that stuff. And that speech would look like a high point of Chaplin's sound career once his later sound films came out.

Autobiographically, though, Limelight fascinates me: Chaplin's lead character really seems like an idealized version of Chaplin's music-hall comedian father, absent for much of Chaplin's childhood. Claire Bloom's depressed ballet dancer seems like a love letter from Chaplin to his music-hall singer mother, whose career was cut short by children and mental illness.

But oh, the speeches, delivered by Chaplin again and again. The pithy aphorisms. The pearls of wisdom. The music-hall comedy routines of Chaplin, none of them funny, none of them playing on Chaplin's gift for physical comedy but instead playing on unfunny song and patter. 

And so, so, so long. 

The only onscreen pairing of Chaplin and Buster Keaton is wasted in a piano/patter routine which at least supplies the one big laugh of the movie -- a piece of physical comedy that concludes the Chaplin/Keaton bit and, thankfully, results in the death of the Chaplin character by slapstick.

If you saw only this Chaplin movie, you'd be puzzled by how this guy became the world's biggest movie star, not just then but perhaps of all time. So don't watch this movie. Not recommended.