Word: limelights
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...world premiere in London of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (see CINEMA), one cinemagoer drew almost as much attention as the picture. Seated in the royal box amid frothy net, rich upholstery and white-tied escorts was Princess Margaret, dressed in a fetchingly low-cut crinoline gown and seemingly unaware of raised eyebrows and buzzing tongues...
...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...
Described by Chaplin as "a drama with comedy relief," Limelight avoids the ideological preoccupations and messages of his three previous films, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), The Great Dictator (1940) and Modern Times (1936), and goes back to the 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...
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...
...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 as the screen is ever likely...