Word: chaplinitis
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...confidence Claire Bloom felt about herself at 14 is now, seven years later, shared by a majority of the critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Even those who did not like Charles Chaplin's self-conscious new film, Limelight, showered Claire, his leading lady, with such adjectives as "poignant," "delightful," "brilliant," "touching," "charming," "perfect." This week in London, Claire is winding up the second month of a triumphant Romeo and Juliet at the historic Old Vic theater. She has been hailed as the most enchanting Juliet in memory...
...Says Chaplin: "I tested hundreds of girls for Limelight. They were all very pretty, very candy-box, very deadpan, but not what I needed. Claire has distinction, an enormous range, and, underneath her sadness, there is this bubbling humor, so unexpected, so wistful." Claire is a pretty girl, but no beauty: the quality that makes critics and plainer-spoken men yearn over her is charm-a charm to whose single-minded cultivation she has devoted her whole, determined young life. One critic has compared this quality to "the wistful beauty of a lonely blossom of wood sorrel." Of her Juliet...
Planned were pictures starring Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Harold Lloyd, Greta Garbe, W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers...
Gone, too, unfortunately, are much of the liveliness and visual wit of such Chaplin achievements as City Lights (1931) and The Circus (1928). The picture often comes close to a halt with lethargic talk and lackluster philosophizing. Chaplin didn't intend Limelight to be a comedy; he calls it "a two-handkerchief movie." But most moviegoers should find one handkerchief ample. As drama, the picture is largely barren: the clown is not really in love with the girl nor she with him, although she tries to be, out of gratitude. Her heart's desire is a young composer...
...wintry artificiality, a few of the individual performances sometimes have a springtime sweetness. In Claire Bloom,* Chaplin has found one of his loveliest leading ladies and an actress of lyric grace. Chaplin's own acting now & again glimmers with the poignancy of his internationally beloved little tramp. And in one magnificent music-hall scene, in which Chaplin plays a left-handed violinist and stony-faced Buster Keaton an impossibly nearsighted pianist, the two greatest comedians of the silent screen make Limelight glow with a sure sense of pantomime-timing, as crisply clean and uncluttered a masterpiece of comic craft...