With the 1952 film "Limelight" (which I discuss in this clip), Charlie Chaplin was both telling a counterfactual version of his life story and attempting a comeback. He had never lost his fame, but he had lost his popularity, quickly, between 1940, when the "The Great Dictator" was released and quickly ranked among the highest-grossing films ever, and 1947, when the release of "Monsieur Verdoux" nearly sank United Artists. What had changed was Chaplin—and the United States. In "Monsieur Verdoux," Chaplin—borrowing a suggestion from Orson Welles—cast himself as a dapper Bluebeard, a refined serial killer who murders his many wives and goes to the gallows with a supreme contempt for the laws and norms of the society that drove him to such desperate extremes. In 1936, in "Modern Times," as the Little Tramp thumbing his nose at plutocrats during the Depression, Chaplin had had public opinion behind him, as he did when mocking Hitler and Mussolini. But when mocking law and order, familial sentimentality and mercantile vulgarity—not from below but, so to speak, from above—Chaplin sacrificed the popular touch. With the country and, especially, the government and the press in full Cold War mode, Chaplin's pessimism—combined with accusations that he was a Communist or a sympathizer—led to a heated backlash of outrage, including local bans on the movie and calls for a nationwide ban. The movie was admired mainly by leftist writers; in the mainstream press, the movie was, for the most part, panned (including at The New Yorker).
With "Limelight," Chaplin thought he had a sure thing going—a sentimental story set in the world of the English music halls that he had traded for a career in movies. But here, too, his bitter philosophical vein took over. In his biography of Chaplin, Kenneth Lynn writes, "At their very first meeting in New York, [his co-star Claire] Bloom recalled, Chaplin informed her that the opening scenes of 'Limelight' were set 'in the Kennington slums where he was born.' " The story, though set in 1914, begins where Chaplin more or less found himself at the time of the shoot—an elderly has-been, both well-known and unpopular—and it reveals him to be endowed with an ironic loftiness of character that was out of synch with the new tastes of the times. (In this magazine's capsule review, the film was brushed aside as "somewhat garrulous" and "rather solemn a good deal of the time.") After Chaplin completed the film—and before it was released� �Chaplin travelled to London, where, faced with McCarthy-ite suspicions, his reëntry visa to the U.S. was denied. Under pressure from rightist groups, many movie theatres throughout the country refused to show the film. In 1957, while in exile, Chaplin made the film "A King in New York," a furious, uproarious, ingeniously imaginative lampooning of McCarthy-era America; it was the last film he'd ever star in.
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