CHARLIE AND THE HIVE
Dworkin, Martin S.
Charlie and the Hive By MARTIN S. DWORKIN AN OLD clown, who has outlasted his fame, having lost his ability to please the public, saves a young ballerina from suicide. His spirit gradually...
...To the millions in the world to whom he is the living immortal of films, and whom we are trying to convince of the integrity of our ideals and the maturity of our leadership, this behavior is profoundly shocking...
...At last, the old clown is found, and a great theatrical benefit is set up for his honor and profit...
...The latter is one of five Chaplin children to appear...
...There is none of the political commentary of Chaplin's recent films here...
...In the interpolated ballet, he plays a clown attending a dying Columbine...
...Even as his mastery ensures our entertainment, he tells us that styles of what is entertaining and what is not do change...
...To strike to the heart of our understanding, he chooses the terms he best understands...
...Many who will not see the film will be affected nevertheless by some judgment of it...
...But at the moment of his triumph, recalling the power to move people to laughter that had made his name a symbol for great comedy in his generation, he suffers a last heart attack...
...fewer seem to understand it...
...But this merely expresses in the contemporary government style of devious administrative harassment an attitude towards Chaplin that has already been manifested in outright censorship...
...The notion that the security of the nation is endangered by either is an expression of the unthinking conformism of the hive...
...it must be given meaning, though this be no more than the meaning of life's eternal renewal of itself...
...the bitter philosophizing of Calvero, the clown, expresses Chaplin's egotism, as well as his aggressive regret at having left the little tramp behind—and with him the ability to make anyone, anywhere, laugh...
...He has no need for the claque that had been trained by the ballerina to prevent another disappointment...
...The critical response to Limelight shows a querulous impatience with any Chaplin other than Charlie, the clown-tramp who became one of the most universally-known symbols of this film century...
...He dies in the wings of the theatre, as the ballerina dances on the stage...
...The life process must go on, for its own sake...
...If we are to believe them, the film is a labored telling of a trite story, impeded by banal monologues, and redeemed only by excellences of performance and production...
...Thereby the poignancy of what he says is underscored...
...And this is the more puzzling because of the widespread recognition of the virtuosity of its production...
...Here he transcends the doubts which had sapped his genius for mastering an audience...
...This, in outline, is the story of Chaplin's Limelight, celebrating "The glamour of Limelight, from which age must pass as Youth enters...
...As she moves forward to fame, professing love for him, although attracted to a young composer, who loves her, he feels the disparity not only of age, but of success...
...These efforts are directed to protect the public from Chaplin's political beliefs and personal morality...
...Again we pay the price of our relentless sensationalism...
...A majority of reviewers appear to deplore the passing of the tramp—as if he is gone...
...From his cast he has evoked excellent performances, particularly from Claire Bloom as the ballerina, and his son Sidney as the composer...
...In the limelight of our public favor Chaplin is no more entitled to the by no means uncommon vicissitudes of his private life, than he is to the expression of stupid, half-baked opinions on Communism and the Soviet Union...
...some of the remainder excuse it...
...The music hall turns he performs so superbly are not of our modern genre, but of the period...
...the story of the old clown who can no longer evoke laughter is also one of people who can no longer laugh at certain things...
...He has written the film and its music, directed and produced it, composed its ballet...
...The Department of Justice has negated years of effort by our information services to prove the existence of an American culture, by ordering the immigration service to detain Chaplin when he returns from his present trip to an applauding Europe...
...His own performance as Calvero is magnificent...
...But Limelight nevertheless is occasioning controversy as bitter as did Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and the proscribed Monsieur Verdoux...
...It is as if a work of art of great delicacy and intricate subtlety were to be praised for its perfection, yet condemned because of its most literal appearance...
...Not simply Limelight, but no Chaplin film may be shown in the state of Tennessee—not even in motion picture trade screenings...
...Thus the tenderness of this last scene has an overtone of irony—even as the random philosophizing throughout the film is always distinctly salted and acerb...
...Youth must be kept from yielding to futility, from destroying itself...
...Various localities elsewhere have devised forms of censorship...
...But Chaplin has already shown us its essential honesty earlier in the film, by reversing it in what is patently a charade...
...The last scene, with Calvero dying in the wings as the ballerina dances on, has impressed many as bathetic melodrama...
...Youth must learn to bear death, the final, ineluctable parting...
...II If we look at Limelight on its own grounds, as if its creator were entitled to deal with any theme about which he himself feels deeply, we will see something of a masterpiece —different from his other masterpieces, to be sure, but as surely not deplorable for that reason...
...She too is carried in her bed for a last look at the world beyond her window—just as he is later carried into the wings to watch life dancing on as he is dying...
...In this view, the film draws frankly on autobiography...
...Very few admit to liking Limelight...
...The aging clown prevents the suicide of the young ballerina...
...He leaves her, performing with a group of derelict street musicians, while she tours the capitals of Europe, to the acclaim that had once been his...
...His spirit gradually replenishes her confidence and will to live, enabling her to triumph over a paralysis symptomatic of her despair over the futility of life...
...He places his story of age and youth, of living and dying, in the precise era when he himself was in the youth of his fame, just before and in the early days of World War I. Free of the bearing of wars or depressions on the matter of living he can more clearly deal with what he regards as essences of life and death...
...Indeed, the quality of Limelight most surely missed by most reviewers is its irony...
Vol. 17 • February 1953 • No. 2
