FILM CHRONICLE
671
who loves whom, and he has settled it that she belongs to the young
composer (a part played by Chaplin's son) . This is no very great renun–
ciation, nor indeed is it presented as one. Calvero has simply avoided
an entanglement as the Tramp always did, and he has bettered the
Tramp by accomplishing this in such a way as to emphasize his own
attractiveness. When he has gone away and the girl after many months
finds him again to say she still loves him, he replies with magnificent
candor: "Of course you do. You always will."
It
is easy to believe him, too, for no one else in the movie is allowed
to rival his charm and the mature strength of his presence, or even to
become real. The girl herself, though she takes her place readily enough
in the gallery of Chaplin's heroines, has less independent power than
any who have preceded her. Chiefly, her function is to listen attentively,
to offer herself as a passive object for his benevolence, and, since she
is not actually blind, to look at him with adoration as once the Tramp
would have looked at her; the looks Calvero casts back at her are looks
of kindness. As for the young man, his function is to be young and
nothing more. Calvero will give way to him because age must give way
to youth, fathers must give way to sons, the "glamour of limelight"
cannot last forever; that is the theme of the movie. But again Chaplin
sets his own terms, and if he yields, it is only in principle: between the
young man's stiff, undifferentiated "youth" and Calvero's lively and
self-assured "age," there can be no reaL contest. It is Calvero whom the
girl will always love-"of course."
Only among the minor characters is the color of reality allowed
to emerge: in the frowzy, small-minded landlady, and in her dreadful
friend who appears for just a few seconds and says nothing; in an
armless music-hall performer encountered in a bar (later cut out of
the film); and most of all in the self-contained, almost grotesquely
prosaic street musicians who keep reappearing through the movie as rep–
resentatives both of the hard everyday world where one must make a
living as one can and of the "universal" world of art. In his treatment
of these marginal figures Chaplin comes closest to a free and disinterested
feeling for others; he could not have made such honest and simple use
of them without a certain kind of love, even if this love is expressed
sometimes only in the pitilessness of his observation.
The peculiarly stilted quality that troubles one in
Limelight
comes,
then, not from any failure of sensibility but from a further narrowing
of the field of associations and sympathies in which Chaplin's sensibility
can operate, and from a consequent suppression of drama. The Tramp,
despite his ultimate frigidity, at least maintained an active flirtation with
