Word: clown
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Limelight (Charles Chaplin; United Artists), Chaplin's first film in five years, is a sad disappointment. Intended as a tragicomedy, if not a tearjerker, it is a two-thirds bore that comes to life in the last half-hour or so, when the old-master clown stops trying to be pathetic and reverts to his inimitable proper stuff. The 63-year-old comedian, who wrote the script (and the music) and directed the movie, plays an aging, down-at-heel music-hall performer who saves a beautiful young ballet dancer (Claire Bloom) from suicide in World War I London...
...simple little tramp-meets-girl, loves-girl, loses-girl theme of his famed silent movies. But Chaplin no longer plays the tramp with the cane, battered derby, brush mustache and oversized shoes. In Limelight he is a dapper, though slightly seedy (and in heavy stage make-up rather repulsive) clown in spats and velvet-collared coat. Only a few reminders of the old tramp remain in a couple of music-hall sequences...
...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 (played by Chaplin's 26-year-old son Sydney). Since the leading characters are only dancing a minuet, they...
...clowns of private life," Martyn Green as the Lord High Executioner signs: "I've got 'em on my list. They'd none of them be missed." An incomparable clown of public life, Green himself must certainly be misser by the D'Oyly Carte company. With Green as star, S. M. Chartock's new company can bid for the audiences which have always equated D'Oyly Carte with Gilbert and Sullivan...
...says that we Republicans don't have a sense of humor? We have renominated that clown Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin and his comrades Jenner and Cain in their respective states ... I do hope that we don't carry our humor too far and produce a framework of senatorial party organization within which it would be impossible for constructive [Republican] conservatives and responsible liberals such as Morse, Ives, Lodge, Smith, Saltonstall, Aiken, Duff and Thye to operate in behalf of the people...