FILM CHRONICLE
673
do is suggest the need for eloquence without ever realIy attaining
it.
Even his jokes are too often labored and stuffy. "What can the stars
do?" he asks in
his
discourse on consciousness. "Nothing!-sit around
on their axes." To hear this from the greatest comedian in the world!
But
is
his failure also a kind of success? I can only say it is possible
to see it that way. I have no convincing argument to advance against
those who see
Limelight
as no more than a crude structure of self-pity
and banal "philosophy" interspersed here and there with glimpses of a
past greatness. But the crudities of a great artist always have an extra
dimension; Chaplin cannot so easily divest himself of his talent no
matter how he may blunder. Nor can we divest ourselves of the sense
of his presence, perhaps one might say his "tradition": the face and
body that move before us on the screen have belonged also for alI these
years to the Tramp, and then to Verdoux; even the voice and the words
come somehow not unexpected. This is an extra-aesthetic element,
maybe, but there it is. One way or another, the movies are always forc–
ing us outside the boundaries of art; this is one source of their special
power. And of Chaplin perhaps it could even be said that in some sense
he has never been an artist at alI-though he is full of arts-but always
and only a presence.
Calvero's failure has at least this in common with the Tramp's
failure and Verdoux's: he fails in dead earnest and with a straight face,
intelligently prepared for failure, it is true, but not for the particular
kind of failure that comes to him, and never dreaming that his essential
worth can be called into doubt. He is an honest bankrupt, so to speak,
doing his best to the very end and concealing no assets; it just happens
that the money in his vault is in some way devalued-not exactly coun–
terfeit, but not altogether sound either. And yet there is something in
the confidence with which he hands it over that makes one hesitate to
examine it closely, at least in his presence. Suppose he should demand
to see what money
we
are paying our debts with? "We're all grubbing
for a living, the best of us," Calvero says once, and he is right as usual,
though uninspired. For he does manage in spite of everything to impli–
cate us in his failure. He does it not by detachment and true insight–
as he might do if he were the projection of a "real" artist instead of a
clown--but, on the contrary, by the hopeless depth of his own involve–
ment; by his suspicious eagerness to have us look into his messy, unil–
luminating, and amateurishly doctored account books; and above all by
the irresistible, brilliant purity of his egotism.
Nothing escapes the deflecting force of this uncompromising self–
absorption. When Calvero philosophizes, he puts all philosophy under
