756 Limelight

[swo17]

Limelight



Charlie Chaplin's masterful drama about the twilight of a former vaudeville star is among the writer-director's most touching films. Chaplin plays Calvero, a once beloved musical-comedy performer, now a washed-up alcoholic who lives in a small London flat. A glimmer of hope arrives when he meets a beautiful but melancholy ballerina (Claire Bloom) who lives downstairs. An elegant mix of the comic and the tragic, this poignant film also features Buster Keaton in an extended cameo, marking the only time the two silent comedy icons appeared together on-screen. Made at a time when Chaplin was under attack by the American press and far right, Limelight was barely distributed in the United States upon its initial release, but it is now considered one of his essential and most personal works.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Chaplin's "Limelight": Its Evolution and Intimacy, a new video essay by Charlie Chaplin biographer David Robinson
• New interviews with actors Claire Bloom and Norman Lloyd
• Chaplin Today: "Limelight," a 2002 documentary on the film, featuring director Bernardo Bertolucci and actors Bloom and Sydney Chaplin
• Outtake from the film
• Archival audio recording of Charlie Chaplin reading two short excerpts from his novella Footlights
• Two short films by Chaplin: A Night in the Show (1915) and the never completed The Professor (1919)
• Trailers
• PLUS: An essay by critic Peter von Bagh

[EddieLarkin]

Is there a particular reason why The Professor would be featured here and not in a First National set (I assume there is, as it came with the Limelight DVDs as well)? Hopefully they're actually planning one, rather than spreading out the 9 films (all of them shorts or very short features) across their remaining releases (A Woman of Paris, The Circus and A King in New York). I forget, was it a sure thing that Jackie Coogan featured in the 2014 New Year's Day Drawing?

A Night in the Show will be part of Flicker Alley's upcoming Essanay set, I imagine from a different (and superior) source.

[Shrew]

Limelight has a gag about a flea circus, which is the center of The Professor, so that's probably why it's here.

But yeah, The Kid was hinted and should be coming at some point, possibly on its own or with the rest of the National films.

[sir_luke]

Beaver. Looks gorgeous.

[Minkin]

Blu-ray.com

@EddieLarkin - A Night in the Show appears to be from the same restoration done by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Lobster Films, thus it should look the same as what's on the eventual FlickerAlley / BFI sets.

[domino harvey]

Finally got to this one and it's easily at the tail-end of the Chaplin features I've seen quality-wise (behind, what else, A Countess from Hong Kong). The film is staggeringly unfunny in its gags (there is not a single laugh in the entire 138 minutes) and, while Chaplin has never been the most subtle of directors, Claire Bloom apparently took the advice to "Tell me you love me a lot" to heart. Don't play a drinking game around that proclamation, you'll go into Leaving Las Vegas mode long before the film ends. The much ballyhooed match-up with Buster Keaton is also a total dud, with Keaton given nothing to do other than reshuffle the same papers over and over. As ever, the pathos is a bit thick in even the best Chaplin film, and this one's romantic mechanations and pity partying don't do his crutches any favors. I see now why there are so few responses in this thread!

[knives]

I actually rather like this one (my favorite feature after Modern Times and A Woman of Paris), though I'm not going to be too strong a defender as that like is just relative to some of Chaplin's other films. I've never found him particularly funny so the fact that this film doesn't really try to doesn't bug me all that much. Beyond that I guess I find the melodramatics to actually work here even if they are very corny.

[Saturnome]

It's my favorite feature of his, even if it isn't funny at all and kind of cheesy. Every attempts at making gags feel purposely outdated but kind of charming. The Chaplin-Keaton should have been funny though, since it would be their only time together on camera and that it's supposed to be Calvero's comeback success. It's a great "last" film, as I consider his two following features to be, hm, errors.