Limelight

The Show Must Go On
LIMELIGHT must serve as the ultimate "love it or hate it" film. If you fit into the "hate it" category, then you'll find this a silly, self-serving, self-indulgent, over-long piece of megalomania. You may think of it as overly sentimental and possibly emotionally manipulative, with Chaplin pitying himself at every turn and pitching all his neuroses onto the big screen. On the other hand, I absolutely adore it. Sure, it's melodrama, but it's the purest and best form of melodrama. It comes straight from Chaplin's heart and the autobiographical feel gives the sad moments just that much more of a kick.

Set in London in 1914, the story and its characters are very simple. An old music hall clown at the end of his career turns to alcoholism and a young ballerina loses her confidence and attempts suicide. If that sounds depressing, you're right; and that's only the film's opening sequence. The movie isn't an out and out downer though; it has its emotional highs and lows as...

Clowntime is over
To this day, the audiences don't know whether to laugh or cry when encountering this long-winded melodrama about an aged performer and a troubled young ballerina.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci is among those who consider "Limelight" Charles Chaplin's masterpiece. When the tramp clown breathes his last, "Who is dying here is not Calvaro, but Charlie Chaplin," Bertolucci says in the DVD documentary. "With 'Limelight,' tears flow very easily."

The MK2 documentary for "Limelight" is the Chaplin Collection's best so far. It covers the period in which Chaplin left the United States, only to return once, reluctantly, for his honorary Oscar.

The docu doesn't address the old charges that Chaplin spiked Buster Keaton's best work in the film. Regardless, the extended Keaton-Chaplin slapstick sequence remains the highlight for many viewers. The DVD photo gallery includes W. Eugene Smith's terrific stills of the men at work.

The film enjoy...

For the best image quality, stick with the previous releases
Warner Bros really blew it with these new Special Edition releases of the Chaplin films. Instead of transferring them to DVD from the original film sources, they merely converted some PAL versions to NTSC. So, while the new Warner's DVDs have better sound than the previous versions released by Image Entertainment, they are also slightly sped up due to the PAL to NTSC conversion. But, worst of all, as The Laser Examiner website noted, "The picture quality during normal playback is noticeably softer and less defined in texture as well as detail, and the overlaps make the motion fuzzy as well." So, if you're a visual purist, you're probably better off grabbing the original Image Entertainment DVD releases of the Chaplin films.

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