TO WRITE about Limelight is a task which has nothing in common with the professional critic’s monotonous day-to-day, week-to-week job. The following comments, then, are a meditation upon an event called Limelight.
I am discussing the film before seeing it again in a public cinema. I write on the basis of the remarkable gathering at Biarritz at which the whole French cinema world wept at the sight of the death of Molière—that is to say, of Calvero, alias Chaplin. When I say wept, I am not exaggerating. As the lights went up, they revealed four hundred directors, screenwriters, and critics choked with emotion, their eyes red as tomatoes. There is only one word to describe the note struck by this film, and we must first restore it to its full classical meaning—sublime.
This performance was undoubtedly intended simply as a prepreview of Limelight. But the selectness of the spectators, and above all the presence of Chaplin, made of it a complex affair of which the film itself was just one component. The audience was at once the most alert and the most receptive ever assembled. Its predisposition to be favorable was conjoined with the greatest lucidity. But at the same time this unusual assembly was justified as much on the ground of Chaplin’s presence as by the film itself. Half of the performance we attended was in the hall.
Granted, there is nothing so very original in such a situation, but what happened showed that in the circumstances it took on a very special significance. Naturally it was a matter of paying a moving tribute to Charles Chaplin—and much could be said about the enthusiasm aroused by his visit, and about the undiminished strength of his popularity. But this would not be enough to explain either the intensity or the quality of our emotional response to the film. I am going to try to make myself understood by setting up a ridiculous hypothesis: what would Limelight mean to an imaginary spectator who had never heard of Chaplin or of Charlie? Probably the question is meaningless because it contains a contradiction in terms—and this contradiction immediately gives us the measure of the film. There are certainly more people on earth who have never heard of Napoleon or Hitler or Churchill or Stalin, than of Charlie. The Great Dictator was not possible, indeed had no meaning, except insofar as Chaplin was sure that the myth of Charlie was more powerful and more real than that of Hitler, that their physical resemblance worked in his favor, and that Charlie would thereby drain his double of his blood, leaving only skin and bone. For it is crucial to grasp that the basis of the film was not the exploitation by Chaplin of his likeness to the man of Berchtesgaden; on the contrary, it was based on the unwitting imitation of Charlie by Hitler. To unmask the dictator, Chaplin had only to remind the world of his copyright in the moustache.
This is something that must be thoroughly understood before one starts thinking about Limelight. It is impossible to separate the story of Calvero from the Chaplin myth. I do not mean in the elementary and primary sense that one can discern in the story some obvious autobiographical elements—“a portrait of the artist by himself,” as one English critic put it; but in a more basic sense, namely of a self-criticism of the myth by its author. Verdoux was already meant to do this: the killer of widows was Charlie disguised as his social opposite number. In Limelight the machinery is much more complex, to the decisive degree that we are not concerned with Charlie but with Chaplin himself. Verdoux, in a sense, represented the dialectical triumph of the character of Charlie and by the same token the end of him. Limelight treats by implication the relations between an actor and character he plays. Calvero was once famous but old age, helped on by alcoholism, lost him his engagements. In a few years the public had virtually forgotten not only Calvero’s name but even what he looked like, so that when he was offered a modest opportunity to return to the stage, he preferred to use a false name. This was a mistake, because the public might have paid some slight attention to Calvero, but was totally uninterested in an unknown, aging clown.
May we not see in this episode, as in Calvero’s decision to give up the music hall in exchange for the anonymity of a street singer, a touching self-questioning on Chaplin’s part? What would he be without the glory of being Charlie, what would he be, deprived of his myth and left to the resources of his craft with such strength as old age can muster?
Limelight, then, is certainly autobiography, above all in reverse. The downfall of Calvero, the heartlessness of the public, the renunciation of love by the old clown, are the shadows thrown behind Chaplin by the light of his glory, of his success, both professionally and in love. A psychoanalyst might go a step further and point out that to evoke this imaginary failure is not unconnected here with the failure of Chaplin’s father, a singer who lost his voice and vainly sought consolation in drink. The London of the film is the London of Chaplin’s wretched childhood, but the street urchins in Limelight are his own children, and in real life Calvero’s rival in love is Sydney Chaplin.
But enough! A psychoanalysis of Limelight adds nothing to its value. All that matters is to reveal how intimately the work depends on its author. Futhermore, this dependence is not so much psychological as what we might call ontological. While Limelight is a direct evocation of Chaplin’s childhood, this evocation is subordinated to the theme of the actor’s relation with the character he plays. The true subject of the film remains: Can Charlie die? Can Charlie grow old? Instead of handling this two-fold and touching inquiry like a question to be answered, Chaplin exorcises it through a story of the lost fame and old age of a man who resembles him like a brother.
That night at Biarritz found us in a marvellously effective combination of circumstances. The audience was composed of the four hundred people in all of France to whom the myth of Charlie meant most—and Chaplin was there! Thus an extraordinary drama was enacted, with three characters: the audience, the film, and Chaplin. When I alluded above to the death of Molière, it was no exaggeration. Molière died on the stage like Calvero, playing in a farce in which he tried to exorcise sickness and death by making fun of doctors.
Thus we were in Chaplin’s presence at the spectacle of his death. And we wept with all the more emotion because we knew he was present and alive. Our tears were multiplied by the gratitude we felt, by the joy that we anticipated when the lights went up of seeing once more his silvery hair, his smile touched with emotion, his blue eyes. Indeed he was there. The film was just a sublime bad dream, but a dream as true as reality, one that allowed us to measure our love for him in his most beautiful role: the death of a clown called Charlie. Who in the world since theater began, what playwright or actor, has ever reached that supreme and paradoxical position in his art of being in himself the object of his tragedy? Doubtless many authors have put themselves more or less into their works, but without the knowledge of the public and hence without the elements of drama. Limelight is not Le Misanthrope, nor is it a play à clef, and Chaplin is not Sacha Guitry. We are concerned with something other than his fame—his myth. Only the age of cinema, doubtless, allows the actor and his character to merge to this extent: Oedipus and Sophocles; Goethe and Faust; Cervantes and Don Quixote.
Molière died unobtrusively, surrounded by a few friends, and was buried by torchlight. Blessed be the cinema which frees our Molière from the necessity of dying in order to make of his death the most beautiful of all his films.