I said I was going to write something about THE WIND, didn’t I? Saw it at the closing gala of the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival and, despite its grim subject matter, it was cinematic ecstasy.
But instead of a proper appreciation I find myself doing whatever this is (a comic strip?)
The film has a supporting character called Sourdough, you see, a sort of Gabby Hayes / Walter Brennan sidekick type. Here he is:
And this is what he’s singing:
Request granted!
Seems ole Sourdough went Northwest, to the Klondyke Gold Rush of ’98 (this may have involved some time travel) and met his fate in an icy wilderness. Somehow his friends were able to locate the exact spot at which he got lost… Did they find his body there? Most people, when they find themselves lost, wander about a bit in hopes of getting found. Ole Sourdough never was the sharpest.
One more connection — the heroine of THE WIND, Lillian Gish, gets off the train and is given a long cart ride by Sourdough and his friend Joe to her destination, a ranch called Sweetwater. The name provokes hilarity from another traveller on the train — it seems an ironic joke in this sand-blasted locale. Of course the connected film is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but I don’t know if the reference, presumably deliberate, originates with Leone, or Bertolucci (who recalls stuffing the script with nods to his favourite westerns), or co-writer Dario Argento (who might well enjoy THE WIND’s terrifying climax).
In OUATITW, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is transported from train station to Sweetwater by a gummy Sourdough type, Sam (Paolo Stoppa), who is likewise amused by the place name.
THE WIND seems outside the range of films OUATITW is otherwise paying tribute to / cribbing from. It’s full of western stuff, but doesn’t feel like a western — but, like OUATITW its central generic atypicality is the presence of a female protagonist. The Leone film ultimately struggles to keep Jill central, and ultimately will have one of her rivals for lead character, Harmonica (Charles Bronson), say that she no longer matters at all to the central conflict, which is true in the moment but also kind of an admission of defeat by the very masculine authors. THE WIND has different (studio-imposed) third act issues, but to its credit writer Frances Marion and director Victor Sjostrom keep Gish’s Letty absolutely at the heart of the film, as active protag, focus of sympathies, and chief point of view for the audience…
Picked up a copy of Charlie Chaplin and His Times by Kenneth S. Lynn. Kind of late in my Chaplin odyssey to start a new book, especially one of Mack Swain girth, but what the heck. I turn to the section on LIMELIGHT —
‘…the picture was strewn with references to Charlie Chaplin. Thus a photograph of Chaokin hangs above the mantel in the ageing comic’s rooming-house parlour. From the faded posters in his possession that date from the days of his top billing, it can be seen that he used to be known as the “tramp comedian.” And his very name, Calvero, with its combination of “vero” with three of the letters in “Chaplin,” proclaims him to be the true Chaplin. The proposition that Calvero is indeed Chaplin is underscored by such further details as his old-fashioned button shoes, his left-handed violin playing, and his gently mocking description of himself to the young dancer, Terry Ambrose, as “an old sinner” who has had five wives.’
Good catch on the five wives, I missed that.
I’m not sure that CAL = CHAPLIN and I think that “vero” is some indication of the character’s honesty, integrity, as much as a signpost to The True Chaplin. And since Chaplin is playing Calvero, a photo of the young Chaplin on his wall makes sense. And if he’s going to play the violin, he’s going to have to do it left-handed, because that’s how he in fact played it. But the passage above got me hunting for photos of Chaplin in his actual tramp costume on the walls, and, though they’re not there to be found, it’s interesting that Calvero’s tramp costume, though different, blurs into the same identical silhouette in long shot.
Same picture, different sizes, above the table and then above the lintel.
The name Calvero also has the same sonic beginning and end as Karno, which is also surely relevant.
The first act of LIMELIGHT is basically Calvero saving Terry, then a series of discussions about the miracle of life in which he pulls her back from despair with variations on his “Buck up!” speech from the end of MODERN TIMES. And some theatrical dream sequences.
In the second of these, Calvero is in his own tramp costume, and begins by eating a flower, like Gary Cooper in FAREWELL TO ARMS. And then Terry appears — retroactively incorporated into his dream-act, wearing a bizarre, rather distracting costume. It probably is accurate to the peculiarities of the music hall, and the tutu is there, of course, because she’s a dancer in reality, not a straight man. What all this proves, of course, is that she’s moved into his thoughts.
LIMELIGHT, in a way, reverses the romances of earlier Chaplin films — in THE GOLD RUSH, Georgia doesn’t realise she loves Charlie until very late in the picture. Here, Calvero will nobly deny Terry’s love, using all the reasons we might give — mainly that she’s much too young for him. This is surprisingly effective — Fiona said, anyway, that she believed the love story and didn’t have a problem with it.
It can also be said that LIMELIGHT echoes that earlier showbiz picture, THE CIRCUS — a more suitable romantic lead is offered, and Charlie/Calvero steps out of the way to make it possible. Only here he does it by dying.
The IMDb SEEMS at first to give thorough credits for this film, enumerating all the guests in the dress circle of the Empire, but it gives us no names for the people in the agent’s office. Who is the small actor? It might be the wonderfully named Teddy Kiss Atom, who turns up, much aged, in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. I’m slightly obsessed with Teddy Kiss Atom because his name is Teddy Kiss Atom. But this might equally be his brother (?), Charlie Young Atom. But, come to think of it, those guys seem to have been UK-based. What American small people can we suggest, apart from the obvious Billy Barty?
Wheeler Dryden turns up again as the doctor. The question of Terry’s legs is gone into. As an investigation of a hysterical condition, in which the investigator becomes enamoured of the patient, LIMELIGHT might bear comparison with MARNIE, and it has a similarly studio-bound quality, with similarly patchy process shots. Another autumnal work from the other most famous English filmmaker in Hollywood.
What makes LIMELIGHT a more ramshackle construction is that its central problem refuses to coalesce — is the problem Terry’s despair, Calvero’s drinking, Terry’s paralysis, Calvero’s failure as comedian, Terry’s romances with Calvero and Neville, or what? Each of them is shoved forward, fails to sustain itself, and is yanked off by the stage manager’s dreaded shepherd’s crook (the Charlie cane turned into an annihilating thunderbolt). Flashbacks and dream sequences fragment things further. It’s not that a film can’t be about many things, but probably it has to be about one or two in particular, and those should be very closely related.
What it most successfully is about is two people who have lost heart, and who give each other courage. But Calvero has another Calvary to face first, at the Middlesex Music Hall…
Starting LIMELIGHT with Calvero drunk, so that Chaplin can do his celebrated inebriate act, is an odd choice in a way, because LIMELIGHT is not a comedy. Like A WOMAN OF PARIS, his last serious film, it has comic elements, but it’s at heart a melodrama, and setting it up as such would seem to be its most important task.
But Claire Bloom is attempting suicide by overdose AND gassing, so that side of things is fairly well represented. The uncomfortable humour of her rescuer being pie-eyed is useful because it establishes that there WILL be some comedy, although in fact almost all the comedy we get will be stage performances. In their long philosophical conversations, Calvero and Thereza will mostly play it straight, and the supporting cast don’t get a lot of humour either. Thereza will laugh at Calvero’s funny business, but doesn’t attempt to make him laugh — her only humour comes when she’s with young Sydney Chaplin as the composer, which suggests to me that Calvero is right to see them as a better match than Thereza with himself.
Another family member enters the story — Wheeler Dryden, Chaplin’s less well-known half-brother (less well-known than the talented but horrifying Syd). I’ve seen WD in a silent short at Bologna and found him to be an appalling actor. He’s OK here. He has no real emotions, though, so it’s good that he’s playing a strictly professional medical man.
(To fairly assess Chaplin’s limitations as a writer and director of talking picture drama, one could contrast the scene of Thereza’s overdose with the similar sequence in THE APARTMENT, which is both delicate — Billy Wilder frames the sleeping pills as a reflection in the shaving mirror rather than show them directly — and raw — slapping and puking — mostly offscreen but inescapable — and his doctor is both professional AND passionately moral.)
Dryden was very effective as a radio voice-over in THE GREAT DICTATOR — again, a role without human emotion — but this is his first onscreen role for his half-brother. (WRONG — see comments) I can’t see him as the kind of performer Chaplin would have admired, were it not for the familial relationship. But, on the other hand, apart from his oft-stated commitment to emotional truth, Chaplin also required his players to be technicians who could mimic the way HE played out a scene. Claire Bloom, completely inexperienced as a film actor, was absolutely relieved to find that Chaplin intended to act her part himself, and all she had to do was copy him. This means any inadequacies we find in her perf can be laid squarely at Chaplin’s door.
Bloom liked his leading ladies young, and he liked them inexperienced — virginal, we might say. MONSIEUR VERDOUX was atypical in that Martha Raye was an experienced comic. But she wasn’t the romantic lead, the ingenue Marilyn Nash was, even though Raye has more of a sex relationship with Verdoux than “the Girl” does.
Chaplin had been becoming more and more careful about the amount of romance he allowed himself onscreen. In THE GOLD RUSH, the Little Fellow doesn’t achieve an actual romantic relationship until the final shot, and in CITY LIGHTS it’s all subterfuge and mistaken identity and in the final shot it’s not at all clear than the logical next step will be a romance. MODERN TIMES offers a fantasy and then a brief reality of domesticity with a very young girl, but it’s sexless — “insipid,” one female viewer just called it on Twitter. But would be comfortable with it being any more, ah, sipid, than it is?
THE GREAT DICTATOR has Hynkel showing brief lustful passions when he can be bothered, while the Jewish barber has none, his tentative love affair with Hannah seeming entirely chaste.
One thing about Calvero — he has a much deeper, throatier, more masculine voice than any previous Chaplin character with an audible voice. The Jewish barber is almost fluting in tone, his voice nervously up until he makes the big speech at the end and drops an octave or so, as he drops the disguise and becomes Chaplin. Hynkel is slightly deeper and so is Verdoux, but not by much. The light comedy Chaplin is going for seems to provoke from him lighter voices (TGD may not seem light, but there’s a Lubitchian comic-opera airiness to the playing, with throwaway line readings — “Far from perfect” — which contrasts thrillingly with the darkness of the subject.
Calvero, we could say, is Chaplin’s most butch character.
The most surprising gag in this sequence is when Calvero smells gas, and checks first his cheap cigar, then the sole of his shoe. A dogshit joke in a Chaplin film… this is a first, but it’s in keeping with the peeing baby gags from much earlier in his work. Chaplin is not averse to vulgarity if it can be achieved in a subtle way. It’s important here that Calvero has NOT stepped in anything offensive, so the joke is about his booze-fuddled misapprehension, not actual faecal matter.
Chaplinesque cheapness: when Calvero shoulders Thereza’s door in (told you he was butch), the entire wall bends inwards. Building a set with a wall that can remain rigid in such circumstances is no small thing, but of course it’s perfectly possible, and necessary when you have a script that demands it. And LIMELIGHT was filmed with fairly strict fidelity to the script.
Deduct a few marks from art director Eugene Lourie, a man with a substantial career as designer (RULES OF THE GAME) and a less distinguished one as director (GORGO and other giant monster pics).
There’s more cheapness in the view from Calvero’s second-floor window. Lourie built a miniature London cityscape rather than having a painted backdrop executed, which is not a bad idea in itself. But it matters how you do it. A big, distant model with some kind of diffusion is always going to look better than a tiny model right beside the window frame. And even though we’re told this was a model, it LOOKS completely painted and completely flat. Which is in keeping with the look of all CC’s post-Charles D. Hall designs. Costa Gavras can claim that in THE GREAT DICTATOR the cheap flat look suggests something about the pasteboard artifice of fascism, that argument is weakened when the same flimsiness prevails in a film about the pre-war music hall.
(But we can entertain ourselves by imagining Gorgo or Behemoth the Sea Monster or the Rhedosaurus from THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS rampaging across the skyline, as they would in subsequent Lourie joints.)
There is of course an unfortunate irony about Chaplin recreating London in his last American film, and then being forced to recreate New York in his first British one. But that’s fully explained by the vicissitudes of fate — Chaplin would never have considered filming in the UK if he hadn’t been barred from entering the US, and he’d never have felt the need to make A KING IN NEW YORK if not for his exile.
I don’t think LIMELIGHT is very well edited. It’s the only film Joe Inge cut, but I assume Chaplin was looking over his shoulder the whole time, if Mr. Inge was short enough to allow this. So there’s an extremely awkward fade to black in mid-action, designed to splink out Dryden’s emetic treatment of Thereza — the film is much more delicate than THE APARTMENT on this score, and probably had to be in 1952. But fading is a crazy choice. A dissolve would work, but Chaplin would need to have provided some kind of angle change, or else targeted the camera on a time-lapse device like a glass that’s full and then empty. Direct cutting did exist, but was still very much a novelty, and wouldn’t even acquire a name until the nouvelle vague popularized it, and Chaplin would never adopt it. So he’s lumbered himself with an awkward transition.
He’s also lumbered himself with unnecessary exposition — while Thereza might need to ask “Where am I?” since she’s been moved while unconscious, there ought to be a way to avoid having Calvero summarise everything we’ve only just seen. This is the kind of thing that marks Chaplin as an amateur when it comes to dialogue. And LIMELIGHT is his most dialogue-heavy film to date. Fortunately, some good news is on the way — Marjorie Bennett, comic maid from MONSIEUR VERDOUX, is on her way…
shadowplay 