Film Club: Limelight

I greatly enjoyed my first film club chat with Allison of Nerdvampire and was ecstatic when she picked a real blind spot in my movie watching with Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, the last of his American productions before Hoover effectively exiled him. I think I liked this conversation even more than the first, and it was a pleasure not only to see a Chaplin film I hadn't previously viewed but to discuss its charms fully with someone else. So without further ado, I present out discussion below.

Plot synopsis: A washed-up vaudevillian, Calvero (Charlie Chaplin), saves a young dancer (Claire Bloom) from committing suicide and resolves to nurse her back to health. But as Thereza recovers, Calvero only slips further into obscurity. Also features Sydney Chaplin as the charming, young, American composer Neville and Buster Keaton in a show-stopping climax with Chaplin. More somber than Chaplin's classic silents, Limelight nevertheless stands as the best transplant of the auteur's trademark sentimentality into the talkies.

Jake: I'm curious as to how many Chaplin films you'd seen before watching this, Allison, as I couldn't stop thinking throughout just how much Limelight felt like a culmination for his career. Its tone is, for all the sentimentality, far more somber than most Chaplin pictures, but it nevertheless struck me as very much of a whole with his filmography.

Allison: I've really only seen Modern Times, but also the biopic Chaplin which goes over his Hollywood career pretty well. It seemed very reflective of his career as a whole.

J: Ah. Modern Times is a film I thought of often during Limelight. That movie was Chaplin's first to incorporate sound while still passing itself off as a silent picture. It also set a precedent for Chaplin's talkies, at least of the ones I've seen. They all in some way comment on, if not outright attack, the technology and its effect on his image. Modern Times is about technology robbing us of humanity. The Great Dictator tried to use the more realistic effect of sound to directly appeal to his audience, arguably losing the magic of his sentimentality in the process. Monsieur Verdoux served as the dark inverse to his usual themes of a man put-upon by social mechanisms by offering his protagonist long-belated revenge upon them.

Limelight contains bits of all three of these films, a bittersweet, borderline self-martyring, elegy to Chaplin's own career even as he finds the nobility of his protagonist. Calvero is a drunken has-been, but he still has those flashes of sweetness that made Chaplin a megastar.

A: Oh definitely. Calvero might be a drunk, but I never feel unsympathetic towards him. He still dispenses great advice and saves Thereza from being thrown out into the street.Plus, it's not like he's this pompous character who think he's still got it: Calvero is aware he's a has-been and knows that it's drinking that got him there, as much as it might have helped his career.

J: That's why I think the setting is so crucial. By placing the film in the year 1914, Chaplin aligns Calvero's decline with his own ascendancy (1914 was the year Chaplin made his first films for Keystone). So even as Chaplin is shoveling dirt onto the grave of his career, he's acknowledging how he himself must have looked to the old vaudeville stars with whom he worked before jumping to Hollywood. Chaplin made them redundant just as new techniques and performers have put him, Keaton and the rest out of work. It's that willingness to self-criticize that makes the film more than just an old man's pity party.

A: That's a good point. Film as a medium was displacing these cheap theatre shows, but it was definitely caused by the big movie personalities like Chaplin. I will say that I think his and Keaton's performance probably works better filmically than it would from a theater, which could be his own acknowledgement that he's done more as a filmmaker than he could have as a vaudeville performer.

J: I'm glad you say this, because I had an odd feeling of disconnect watching the stage show portions of the film. On the one hand, they permit Chaplin (and, at the end, Keaton) to prove just how much physical comedy they have left in them. On the other, seeing them reduced to a few antics after both innovated the artform to make room for their comedic ambition is tragic even without the reverse shots to empty theaters.

I also think this lines up with Chaplin's camera technique, which was never particularly advanced in relation to his masterful set design but feels downright cumbersome and static in the age of sound. This isn't the only one of his talkies to be like that, either. It could simply be unfamiliarity with the new technical demands, but I think it works thematically. Chaplin's sound films, even on a narrative level, purposefully lack the grace of his silents, and to see him dancing around in a music hall only visualizes what he'd already been suggesting with his camera.

A: The camera was very static, although there was some nice use of cranes in the second half with relation to the stage. What I really liked (and what really stuck around from the silent era) was all of the strong lighting. All of the shadows fell just right, the ingenue was always glowing. The mood was well-set just in regards of light technique.

J: Exactly right, and the angelic lighting of Thereza is always matched by the shadowy twilight hanging over Calvero, as if he's already got one foot in the grave. And yet, in some respects he's more alive than ever. Much as he likes to play sound against itself, he also explores the possibilities it raises. Here we get a chance to listen to Chaplin's singing voice, as well as to hear his gift for wordplay; I laughed out loud when one of Calvero's washed-up pals responds to his command to play largo with, "I'd rather stick with beer."

And if films like Modern Times and The Great Dictator defiantly clung to at least some modicum of silence, the absence of sound here is devastating. By linking sound primarily to the audience response, Chaplin now completely identifies the old format with death. The silence he wanted so badly to continue now signals total obsolescence and the end of fame.

A: And the word play is genuinely funny, but a lot of the script gets bogged down with the drama. But that is another evolution with sound cinema: slap stick, while still situational, winds up being about the dialogue as much as the actions.

Pardon the pun, but I think we keep dancing around a certain subject here: Thereza, who is visually pretty. Kind of boring when not on stage.

J: Yeah I agree, and I think the film hits its biggest snags when it stops to listen to her hysterical sobs of anguish and ecstasy. Calvero's interactions with Thereza are sweet but she herself is too thinly sketched to make much of a difference. I wish her occupation had been something that intersected more with vaudeville to set her up as more of a successor instead of the unrelated dancing.

I do find it interesting, though, how Chaplin frames the relationship between the two. I'm reminded of Cary Grant in Charade: Grant, who preferred younger women, nevertheless made sure it was Audrey Hepburn's character who pursued him, not the other way around, to avoid scandal. Likewise, Chaplin, who'd actually been the subject of controversy for his relationships, has Thereza fall for an uncomfortable Calvero. Then again, maybe Calvero is attracted to her but doesn't want to spend the rest of his life with someone so histrionic.

A: I thought the scene where Thereza was auditioning and reunites with Neville underlined Calvero's perspective. There's this prolonged shot where half his face is in shadow after he realizes that the Meet Cute he thought up becomes actualized. He's forced to realize that his current relationship has to change, no matter how comfortable things have gotten for him. And it's right after that when Thereza tells him she's in love with him. It's a little heartbreaking how much of the decisions in their relationship are left up to Calvero. But I'm sure a lot of this plot was created with regards to his relationships.

J: When Calvero first takes Thereza in, he drolly but sincerely remarks upon the benefits of a Platonic friend, and I think Chaplin gets more dramatic mileage out of Calvero's insistence on getting Thereza over him than he would if he really allowed the two to develop and mutual romance. By making the bond between them something Calvero must break to fully cure Thereza, Chaplin gets to be Platonic but feel romantic. It's a deft bit of screenwriting, and one that makes up for a lot of Thereza's character deficiencies by constantly focusing our attention on how we react to the interplay between Calvero and Thereza instead of on each person.

A: Very true! And I think Calvero is more effective as a character on the whole for not becoming romantically involved, although I do see some undertones towards that.

The screenplay works to that effect by drawing their relationship out. It's not episodic, but it is punctuated with performances, starting with Calvero's dreams and then working up towards actual staged events. Even though Thereza doesn't do vaudeville, it does seem like they relate to each other best as performers, which might be how he can handle her histrionics as well as he does. I expect Calvero must be used to it by now.

I've been thinking, if she had been a vaudeville actress, the plot might have been too much like A Star is Born.

J: Ooh, good point. I also think it differs from A Star is Born in the way it handles the old man's demise and the young woman's rise. A Star is Born is more melodramatic, what with Norman being no less destructive than he is beneficial and taking a more gruesome way out to atone for himself. Much as I like that film, its plot seems more a freakish aberration. Limelight casts the fall of the old and forgotten along with the rise of the exciting and new as more of a cyclical act. Chaplin resigns himself to fading away just as he eclipsed his forebears. As bitter as the film can be, it also accepts this fate with some grace, and even the one last show at the end is his way of going out on a high to leave the up-and-comers free to keep rising without him.

A: It's pretty much the main difference between a straight-up Hollywood monster melodrama and something by Chaplin. He really works to develop these characters and their points in the film to best remark upon that theme.

J: And, naturally, I think that theme is best expressed in the finale, which is simultaneously the most optimistic and the most tragic part of the film. Calvero gets his last shot at adulation, but even setting aside the grim conclusion to his final bow, there's something final in the applause he receives. This isn't a rebirth, it's a wake. He just happens to be alive long enough to experience it.

And I admit I actually cried when I realized that his partner at the piano was Keaton. I knew it was him, given that I was aware of his cameo and this was the end of the film, but I didn't recognize him until this one shot of him looking helplessly at Calvero as their musical number goes uproariously off the rails. He looked so old and broken, even more hollowed out by changing times and scandalous relationships than Chaplin. And yet the two of them find these hidden reservoirs of physical prowess as they stumble and trip over their song, and I was reminded of how great they both were again. It's the comic high point of the film, but also one of the most emotionally and thematically complex sequences Chaplin ever shot. Even more so than the film's sad but graceful conclusion, this climax represents the last word on Chaplin's career.

A: Damn, that is a good place to stop. I certainly can't top it. Final thoughts?

J: Limelight isn't the best of Charlie Chaplin's films (for technical skill I think of The Gold Rush, for emotional resonance I side with his achingly poignant City Lights), but it may be the one that best encapsulates his career. It may be more bitter than sweet, but it emerges as sentimental a view of art as anything he did as the most beloved man in the world.

A: Agreed. And while bittersweet, I think it's still hopeful, in its way. It looks back on a great career and lets him die after a round of applause, rather than forgotten in a room. It shows a very interesting relationship between an artist and his art in that way.

Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)

Sherlock, Jr.'s self-awareness sets into the film instantly, the intertitles that establish each character also listing the actor's name as if it were the character's name. This has the effect of player and performance, the first blur between reality and artifice. Seen today, Sherlock, Jr. looks like the first mainstream American form of surrealism, but this is less by deliberate design on Buster Keaton's part than the inevitable outcome of a film about film, the most inherently surreal artform of them all.

Some express surprise that the film was, in its time, Keaton's least-grossing feature, and its whittled length was the result of negative feedback prompting the artist to cut out chunks of footage. But the sheer strangeness of the movie, its self-reflexive, forward-thinking structure and narrative, must have alienated audiences unprepared to deal with its implications and technical prowess. The General may be Keaton's masterpiece, but it is this movie, even more unjustly ignored by initial audiences, that best proves how ahead of his time the man truly was.

By throwing his projectionist into the movie shown within the movie, Keaton, known for his stoicism and immovable face, is the first to tackle the magic and wonder of movies head-on, and not even that impassive mug of his can hold back a deep feeling of love and fulfillment. He dives into the material with immaculately construction, using surveying equipment to ensure the precise distance between camera and actor to make Keaton's initial daydream of walking into a film frame look possible. When he gets to the narrative of the film within a film, it proves identical to the narrative that started the main movie, instantly blurring distinctions between reality, the film's diegetic world and that of the movie within the movie.

Jilted in "real life" when a rival suitor (Ward Crane) sabotages Keaton's courtship of a young woman (Kathryn McGuire), the projectionist finds himself in a detective story revolving around a case remarkably similar to the one that ejected Keaton from the girl's home. Is it coincidence? If so, how can Keaton enter the second film as the titular detective without any disruption in that narrative?

But these are technical, fussy questions, and Sherlock, Jr. is about the wish-fulfillment of all moviegoers, the chance to step into the screen and interact with these looming demigods, even if only to give ourselves a second chance at our own lives through the aggrandizing power of cinema. No longer is Keaton the poor lackey who wistfully reads a how-to book on detective work in his off-time; instead, he is the heir of Holmes himself, though the real chap's ineptness still shines through. One title card not only highlights Keaton's lingering lack of forensic skill with genre parody when it says, "By the next day the mastermind had completely solved the mystery—with the exception of locating the pearls and finding the thief."

To ignore the technical questions raised by the film, however, would be to ignore the carefully planned intricacy of Keaton's staging. Besides the aforementioned spatial perfectionism for the initial metacinematic gag of Keaton "interacting" with a constantly changing location within the screened film, Keaton uses the blatant movie-movie structure to stage some grand stunts that make use of the film's translucence. A climactic bike chase not only strings together numerous death-defying stunts but relies more on transparently false staging than his usual gag for even larger setpieces. Even before Keaton steps into the film, he throws in a huge gag, running on the top of a train until he must cling to the faucet of a water basin, unleashing hundreds of gallons onto him in seconds. Keaton suffered fracturing from the force of the water and suffered migraines the rest of his life for it. Even smaller gags are incredible: Keaton's leap through a tie vendor's briefcase of wares predates the painted tunnel jokes in Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons by a full 25 years.

Cognizant of real-world concerns of the working class, Keaton juxtaposes such grand stunts with simpler, class-conscious humor. The first great bit of the movie involves no stunt work whatsoever: the projectionist, cleaning up some trash outside the theater, finds a dollar, which gives him enough cash for that nice box of chocolates, only for a woman to walk by and say she lost a dollar. In his desire to keep the cash, Keaton asks her to describe it, an amusing bluff matched by her cheating as she looks over his shoulder to gauge the shape and dimensions, as if money really were scarce enough that one would be unsure of its look. Later, Keaton breaks out an engagement ring for the woman, a gold band so hysterically cheap that the blip on its thin strip looks less like a diamond than a zit. Hilarious as these touches are, they provide a vital, real counterpoint to the movie magic to come, making the escapism all the more appealing. I wonder if this movie would have performed better if it premiered during the Depression, when everyone recognized and knew poverty and ticket sales for escapism soared. Perhaps, then, the film's biggest commercial issue is that is nostalgic for an artform too young to elicit feelings of wistfulness.

The finale, back in the regular film but framed against the screening movie, finds the balance between cinematic wonder and reality, showing Keaton looking to the movies for instruction for reality even as the movies themselves come from our idealized visions of the world as it exists. His copycat romance is Keaton's final statement on cinema, reality informed by fiction informed by reality. It's a constant loop of self-improvement, reality made to fit our fantasies, which in turn become loftier and more romantic to remain dreams. Keaton later said he "just wanted it to look like a dream," but that's what makes it such an enduring movie about movies. Cinema itself is a dream, and few movies come close to capturing the feel Keaton mastered in the medium's infancy.

Keaton Shorts: One Week, The Boat, The Paleface, Cops

"It was Keaton's notion that cutting, valuable as it was in a thousand ways, must not replace the recording function of the camera, must not create the happening. The happening must happen, be photographed intact, then be related by cutting to other happenings."

—Walter Kerr

I like to space out my Buster Keaton viewings, giving myself just enough time between films that I surprise myself with his genius with every binge. I find the whole "Chaplin vs. Keaton" debate more than a bit tedious, though obviously both are divergent yet titanic enough to warrant comparison. I will say, though, that for the undeniable mastery of the two of them, Keaton is the who, to me, best exemplifies comedy, not simply between them but in all of cinema. His cutting, camera technique, scripting, design and performance capture the flow of comedy better than I've seen anyone else do since.

The above quote gets at part of his skill at crafting movies: despite the obvious construction of the setpieces and the distancing effect of silent film pantomime when viewed through a modern prism (neither of which I intend as criticism), Keaton's movies feel so in the moment, so spontaneous, that I not only continue to marvel at his skill but feel surprise at the payoffs. Roger Ebert gets at that in his own praise of Keaton's work, saying "Another of Keaton's strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier." I'm not the most devoted Keaton disciple, but I've seen some of this stuff more than once, and I almost forget what happens because Keaton does such a great job moving escalating every moment on its own terms without telephoning the next gag over the one that's currently playing.

I've been meaning to pick up Kino's Blu-Rays of The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr., and I'm ecstatic that the company is releasing his early shorts on Blu-Ray on my birthday (gift ideas, people). To get myself ready for that essential purchase, but mainly because it had simply been a while, I decided to visit (and revisit) some Keaton shorts.

One Week


My favorite of Keaton's shorts, though I hardly think I'm going out on a limb with that choice. One Week tells the story of a newlywed couple who discover that the house they purchased is a build-your-own kit, a situation made worse by meddling from a jilted suitor. The resulting monstrosity is one of Keaton's best sets, an angular, tilted, menacing house that looks like Dr. Caligari's summer cottage. The mishaps are brilliant; the lengthy gag about the piano alone leads to several other house-warping jokes as wee, wiry Keaton nearly pulls down his ceiling with the makeshift semi-pulley he rigs out of the chandelier. A bit involving the house spinning (the real thing, not a model) makes use of Keaton's intuitive undercranking to speed up his tumble around the place, giving a constant sense of action without repeatedly breaking the shots for variance. The short culminates in what may be my favorite silent punchline, a double bluff that continues to make me guffaw long after the initial surprise has dissipated.

The Boat


From its first moments, as Keaton completes his titular vessel and finds he's made it so big he can't drag it out of his house, The Boat is suggestive, huge and hysterical. Where Chaplin continued to play the downtrodden Tramp long after he hit it big, Keaton was willing to play with the idea of his wealth, but ostentation proves his downfall here. Simply getting his yacht out of his garage rips apart the family house, while putting the damn thing in the water costs him a car. (The way he takes out his aggression for this by yanking his son up off the dock with one hand absolutely slays me.) At sea, matters are even worse, with Keaton slowly demolishing his prop into driftwood. The degradation of the ship in the storm is one of Keaton's best large but self-contained setpieces, surpassed only by his use of the train in The General and the house in One Week. Numerous Keaton films are masterclasses in filmmaking, but few are as succinct as this. The best example of this? Just watch how he subtly establishes the name of the boat solely for use in the punchline, which is so hysterical Keaton lets the mouthed word get the laughs without following up with an utterly redundant title card.

The Paleface


I've yet to see a bad Buster Keaton from the silent era, but obviously some shorts and features aren't as essential as others. The Paleface is one of Keaton's lesser efforts, entertaining but dispensable. Surprisingly, however, it does not particularly fall into the ever-looming trap under such old films of giving way to casual racism or jokes at the expense of Indians. Truth be told, it doesn't have that much to say about Native Americans at all despite its plot, centered on a oil company seeking to throw the Indians off the land to drill, yet Keaton clearly sympathizes with the downtrodden. His alliance with the put-upon makes the film's middle sag with inaction between chases, and the gags are a bit simple for the man who burst out of apprenticeship with Arbuckle with such timeless, advanced work as One Week and The Boat. Yet I still laugh at the simple cheek of Keaton, tied to a pole near the start to be burned for trespassing on Indian ground, keeps waddling away from the tinder pile when his executioner goes to fetch more (it reminds me of Eric Idle's playful convict in The Life of Brain jovially telling his killer that he's actually been released, only to say "just kidding!" when the Roman nearly lets him go.) Minor Keaton from this period, as the old cliché about masters goes, is still Keaton, and the comedy works well enough that The Paleface's chief failure seems to be that it is "merely funny" in comparison to so many outright brilliant works by its maker.

Cops


Purportedly a take on his friend and mentor Fatty Arbuckle's infamous scandal, Cops takes Keaton's gift for perfectly modulated manic crescendo into Kafkaesque realms. Keaton knew how to time his films perfectly, to the point that he can progress a film from trying to impress his lady with good business sense to an inadvertent bomb throwing at a police parade and make it all linear, if deliberately bewildering. Less reliant on stunts than Keaton's construction and pacing, Cops works on the basis of its deadpan presentation of lunacy: the outrageously overladen cart Keaton drives is presented, as ever, without comment, Keaton applying his own stoicism to the frame as he pilots the monolith on wheels through the streets until it almost seems to fit. And when he inadvertently tosses an anarchist's bomb into a crowd of police, all hell breaks loose. The ensuing chase adds more and more cops until it seems everyone in the city has turned into an officer, Keaton chased by a swarm wherever he goes.

Less grandiose than many of Keaton's other works, Cops is nevertheless one of the best showcases of Keaton's style and one of the best fusions of Keaton's own performance and the film's aesthetic around him. The black wave of uniformed officers crashing after Keaton is almost surreal, and every time he thinks he's gotten away, another flatfoot appears in front of him to stall until the horde catches up. As a commentary on Arbuckle, Cops does not sufficiently make the connection between the idea that everyone can act as judge, jury and executioner through public opinion and the literalization of this by filling the city at the end with cops and only cops. But Keaton's demented two-reeler is incredibly atmospheric, even unsettling despite its hilarity; even when he finally gets the upper hand over the police, a disapproving civilian sends him back into the vengeful arms of the law. As such, the wry end card punctuates the sense of doom hanging over such instant, public conviction. Many years later, Chaplin must have watched this with more than a faint hint of recognition, too.