Can you imagine Charlie Chaplin in a serious role? That sounds quite strange but it's true. Charlie Chaplin had made and acted in such a film. Limelight is a serious and autobiographical film by Charlie Chaplin. It stars Chaplin as once-famous comedian who saves a ballet dancer from killing herself. Nursing her back to health, he helps the dancer regain her self-esteem and resume her dancing career. In doing so, he regains his own self-confidence and eventually has a triumphant comeback.
When the film was released in 1952 it was heavily boycotted in the United States because of Chaplin's alleged communist sympathies and the film failed commercially. But it became massively popular in Japan, Europe and around the world.
However, it was re-released in the US in 1972. This allowed the decades-old film to be in contention for the 45th Academy Awards where Charlie Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar. Today, the film is regarded as one of Chaplin's best and most personal works.
The music of the film is par excellence. The instrumental theme to the film composed by Charlie Chaplin and titled "The Terry Theme", became very popular. In 1973, over 20 years after the film's first release, Chaplin and his musical collaborators Raymond Rasch and Larry Russell were awarded an Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score. It was the only competitive Academy Award that Chaplin ever received (he had previously received two Honorary Oscars).
Chaplin spent more than two years writing the script of Limelight. As a preliminary, he wrote the story in the form of a full-length novel entitled “Footlights”. The novel, was not published or apparently even intended for publication. It had lain in Chaplin's archive for decades, and was published for the first time in 2014. The novel was pieced together from a mix of handwritten and typed scripts by Chaplin's biographer David Robinson. It was published by the Cineteca di Bologna, an Italian film restoration institute which has been digitising the Chaplin archive for his family.
Coming back to the film, Limelight is for those who are an ardent fan of Chaplin's art and can love him even in a serious role. It is for those who have an ear for fine western classical music and a taste for Opera and Ballet. And for those who love serious cinema.
I can't give any ratings for the movie, you can't rate a legend's work. But I would just sum up with a review of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had called the film "a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity".
~ Priyanka Singh
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