Charlie Chaplin Won His Only Oscar 20 Years After the Film Was Released

The Big Picture

• Charlie Chaplin only won one competitive Oscar in his career for Limelight due to allegations of communist sympathies.
• Limelight uses music sparingly to amplify moments of joy and despair in the film, which arguably serves as the most autobiographical of Chaplin's career.
• Release delays from theaters hindered Limelight's Oscar eligibility. It won Best Score twenty years later, in 1972.

While winning two Honorary Oscars must have felt great, it had to have stung Charlie Chaplin that he only won a single competitive Oscar in his entire career. He was a notorious perfectionist who took immense pride in his work, and there's no way he didn't think of his work as being deserving of more praise. One imagines he was overjoyed that if he won an Oscar for any one of his films, it would be Limelight, as that film served as the most autobiographical of his career. A tender love story that bridges the gap between truth and illusion, youth and age, dreams and reality, Limelight spoke closely to the man that Chaplin tried to hide under the guise of the Tramp. Facing a transitional period into old age and persecution from America, Chaplin dove into himself to get back to where he came from and show the audience a fabricated glimpse of the real Charles.

Limelight (1952)

GDramaMusicRomance

A fading comedian and a suicidally despondent ballet dancer must look to each other to find purpose and hope in their lives.

Release Date

October 31, 1952

Director

Charles Chaplin

Cast

Charles Chaplin , Claire Bloom , Nigel Bruce , Buster Keaton , Sydney Chaplin , Norman Lloyd , Andre Eglevsky , Melissa Hayden

Runtime

137 Minutes

Writers

Charles Chaplin

What Is Charlie Chaplin's 'Limelight' About?

Calvero (Charlie Chaplin) is an alcoholic vaudeville clown who's about past his expiration date. Painfully aware that the crowds have long since stopped laughing with him (or even at him), Calvero is despondent and silently suffering through a sense of lost purpose. When he happens to smell gas coming from a nearby apartment unit in his building, he breaks in and saves a woman named Terry (Claire Bloom) from a suicide attempt. Turns out that Terry is a ballerina with severe depression and psychosomatic issues resulting in temporary paralysis, and Calvero offers to take care of her in his place, sensing another suffering artist in need. The two form an intimate bond where her depressive tendencies butt heads with his desperate optimism about what life can bring, which leads to a kind of love between them.

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While this back-and-forth could be construed as a straightforward romance, it feels more satisfying to think of it as two sides of Chaplin's psyche battling with each other: the young up-and-comer who's traumatized by her past being encouraged by the older veteran who learned how to hang on to the hunger for more and moved past his self-pity. Whether that lives up to who Chaplin really was at that point in his life is up for debate, but it makes for an efficiently constructed dynamic, since the story mostly relies on these two.

What Purpose Does Music Serve in 'Limelight'?

For a film that won the Oscar for its score, it's surprisingly not as present as you'd think. A good majority of the film uses no score whatsoever, outside the songs that Calvero performs on the stage. Music here is usually deployed as a bold marker, underlining the moments where Calvero and/or Terry are shaken out of their mutual stupors. Be it the soft piano that caresses Calvero's monologue about how life can be wonderful if you chase it, or the rapturous swell of strings that comes in when Terry miraculously walks again for the first time, music can be a heavenly affirmation for two people desperate to believe in something fulfilling. On the flip side, the score can be a harbinger of the sorrow that's always nipping at their heels. From Calvero overhearing Terry discuss how torn she is about her romantic feelings to Terry performing a ballet to melancholic music after Calvero walks out on her with no explanation, the score seeks to reflect the emotions that the characters cannot fully access due to their life of stunted opportunity and battered expectations.

That evolving dance between euphoria and despair speaks to the specific touch that Chaplin brought to all of his best films. Advertisements for Limelight highlighted how it promised both laughter and tears, and it's a succinct encapsulation of Chaplin's approach to storytelling. You cannot truly appreciate the light things in life without also acknowledging the dark things, and Chaplin knew better than to cheat his audience by choosing one over the other. He sought to give his audience a thorough experience by first hooking them with laughter and sneaking the heavy emotions in after the fact, creating a rare cocktail that no one saw coming. Limelight stands out from the rest of his films for how much it seeks to commit to a morbid scenario and wring as much honest pathos out of it as he can. It's not too dissimilar from his previous film, Monsieur Verdoux, where he played a man who repeatedly cons and murders ex-wives, making the audience explore the perspective of a serial killer years before Psycho got all the credit for doing that. Chaplin had clearly grown more cynical about life, despite Calvero's professed vigor, and it's pretty understandable why, given his current circumstances.

Charlie Chaplin Was Exiled From the U.S. For His Politics

Close

Charlie Chaplin was a figure that the American government had been trying to knock down a peg for a while, most notably since the 1940s. In response to the rise of fascist forces in World War II, Chaplin felt more emboldened to profess his progressive values, which resulted in him making one of his most important films, the Adolf Hitler parody The Great Dictator. Despite the film's five Oscar nominations and general success, its now legendary final speech, preaching empathy and anti-fascism, forced audiences to not separate the art from the artist, and that led to backlash. Worse yet, after getting into a paternity scandal with an actress named Joan Barry, J. Edgar Hoover used it as an opportunity to attack Chaplin's image, which only got worse when Chaplin swiftly moved on to his final wife, Oona O'Neill.

This snowballed into his next film, Monsieur Verdoux, getting absolutely roasted by the public and critics, appalled at its cavalier dark humor and anti-capitalist message. Combine this with allegations of his Communist sympathies rearing up, and you have a perfect ice storm of controversy that Chaplin tried valiantly to fight off, to no avail. Shortly after the release of Limelight, Chaplin left America for the premiere in London, and US Attorney General James McGranery officially revoked his US permit and made it known he'd have to have political leanings questioned if he wanted to come back. He never did, preferring to abscond to Switzerland for the rest of his life.

Charlie Chaplin Got His Oscar for 'Limelight' 20 Years Later

By the 1970s, Chaplin had largely stopped making new films in favor of re-releasing old films with new composed scores, Limelight being one of them. While it was initially released in New York City in 1952, the film didn't achieve a widespread American release until 1972, mainly due to theaters not wanting to show the film because of Chaplin's Communist allegations. If you were curious why this film wasn't up for Oscar consideration until 20 years later, this is why. The Oscars have a stipulation that, to qualify for the Oscars, the film must be shown in six different counties in America, including New York and Los Angeles.

It's anyone's guess why the Oscars ultimately gave Chaplin the award for Best Score, but it's likely that the Academy was trying to make it up to Chaplin, since this was one year after they gave him an Honorary Oscar for his career as an apology for how Hollywood treated him all those decades ago. Regardless, it still served as a final capstone in the career of one of the single most versatile artists the medium has ever had, and considering it was for a film that came so closely from his authentic self, Chaplin had to have felt like he'd fulfilled Calvero's dream and made the audience smile one more time.

Limelight is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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