Limelight- Charles Chaplin

Arriving back in NYC jet-lagged, jilted and kinda glowing that I was back where I belonged, I took myself to MoMA and a screening (a very poor one MoMA ..hmmm) of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight.  (The link is old..) Half or very nearly ‘sozzled’ one night too long ago I remember seeing this and ‘somewhere in my youth or childhood’.  There is a very enterprising Brit (or is it Scottish)- ouch- don’t won’t to get the nomenclature wrong there – company Park Circus who issued a Blu ray several years ago. 

-->There was a revival around this time last year at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Limelight was basically banned for 20 years in the U.S. and didn't open in Los Angeles until 1972 (Chaplin and his collaborators won the Oscar that year for Best Score)

The beauty, the intricacy, the casting the EVERYTHING about this film just leaves you speechless. And Chaplin could so easily be from the Brando school of acting 20 years later! Such is his naturalistic performance. (Chaplin’s last film was with Brando and, as if his other talents weren’t enough, he could even compose a hit main film theme as he did with Limelight).  When you read what happened to Chaplin, one becomes so sad. So angry. And moreover so scared as to whether such a thing could happen again in this country. The world’s greatest talents against the talentless in Washington slapped in the face by them as if they deserved nothing better than a gas chamber.

The elements of beauty (and therefore the sublime I guess)  just haunt you in Limelight. And of course truth. How else could that be when Chaplin married playwright Eugene O’Neill’s daughter.