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.
Fighting American, written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby with Jack Oleck, Mort Meskin, John Prentice, George Tuska and others (1954-55, 1966; collected 2011): By the mid-1950's, the American superhero comic book had been reduced to a few 'old' staples (Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman), with the rest of the Golden Age flood cancelled because of low sales. Comics were growing up, with war, horror, romance and crime comics dominating the marketplace, along with the first issues of a little comic book called Mad.
But the industry-self-imposed censorship of the Comics Code Authority, implemented in response to government hearings in both the U.S. and Canada about the contributions of violent comic books to juvenile delinquency, would bring superheroes back as a wholesome substitute for the now-banned excesses and adult situations of crime, horror and war comics. American comic books would descend into a long stretch of second, superhero-dominated childhood, one they've really only been recovering from since the 1970's.
Into the superhero fray would come Fighting American, created by the great Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (who'd created Captain America for Timely/Marvel back in the early 1940's) for Prize Comics. He'd only survive seven issues (as Simon notes in the introduction, that was four better than the revived, Commie-fighting Captain America of the 1950's). But what issues!
The series starts off as a fairly straightforward McCarthy-era superhero book, with super-soldier Fighting American and plucky kid sidekick Speedboy battling Communists and the occasional alien. But McCarthyism was on the way out, and by the third issue, straightforward superhero adventures were as well.
Instead, the comic became more and more comedic and satiric, with our heroes fighting villains that included Hotsky Trotsky, Round Robin, Invisible Irving, Poison Ivan and Rhode Island Red. In what's probably the story closest to being a Mad magazine parody of a superhero comic, a Soviet superman turns out to have powers created by his terrible body odour. He's rendered powerless (and pro-capitalist) by a shower. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Kirby and Simon (who share both art and writing duties) do the lion's share of the artwork here, though some of the material is obviously not from their hands. There's a refreshing lunacy at work here. The comedy doesn't always work, but when it does, it's pretty scathing -- Simon and Kirby were obviously tuned in to the absurdities of the "long underwear" genre (their words, in one of the stories collected here, not mine).
The volume also collects a few stories done for a brief Harvey Comics revival in the late 1960's, though these stories are clearly not drawn by either Simon or Kirby. Fighting American is the grandfather of absurdist Commie-fighting superhero Flaming Carrot and a few others -- the satiric superhero elements and outrageous, occasionally punning names also remind me of Rick Veitch's work. This is great, unusual stuff. In one of the 'straight' stories, the U.S. Air Force bombs Mt. Shasta, where an apocalyptic battle between Commies and Satan-worshipping monsters is taking place. OK, add Hellboy to the list of descendants. Highly recommended.
