Calvero drew laughs because he performed after he had a few drinks. When he is sober, nobody laughs, and now he is unemployed and nearly broke. He lives alone in a small apartment and has to fend off demands for rent from his unpleasant middle-aged landlady (Marjorie Bennett).
One day, a tipsy Chaplin returns to his tenement building and detects gas coming from another apartment. He breaks down the door and saves the life of a suicidal young brunette, Thereza (Claire Bloom). A doctor (Wheeler Dryden) is sent for, who has Calvero carry Thereza to the latter's apartment to sleep it off.
Thereza becomes Calvero's platonic bedridden houseguest. The pretty Thereza, a former dancer with psychosomatic illnesses, falls for the kindly Calvero despite a forty year age difference. Through Calvero's patience and persistence, Thereza returns to mental and physical health.
Because it is a movie, Thereza returns to the stage and becomes a famous dancer. She has a handsome and good-natured suitor, composer Neville (Sydney Chaplin, the most accomplished of Charlie's progeny), but she loves only Calvero, even after he has left her to become a street musician. Calvero believes that is best for Thereza as it will allow her romantic and career freedom.
Nonetheless, Calvero desires a return to the big stage, to prove he still has what it takes. By now, the success and influence of Thereza is enough to compel her wealthy producer Postant (Nigel Bruce) to put on a gala benefit performance featuring Calvero. His act includes Buster Keaton, whose celebrity during the silent era trailed only that of Chaplin. They bring down the house but tragedy strikes.
As is usual for a Chaplin film, not only did he star in it, but he produced and directed it, wrote the story and screenplay, and composed the score.
How others will see it. By 1952, U.S. politics were dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy's obsession with locating public figures with purported Communist sympathies and forcing them to testify in Congress against their peers, or else face a blacklist. Chaplin would have none of this. In 1952, he moved to Switzerland, and did not visit the U.S. again until 1972, when the score for Limelight won a belated Academy Award. Chaplin's perceived Socialist tendencies caused a backlash against the initial release of his 1952 film, and it was not a commercial success.
However, it received praise even in 1952. At BAFTA, it was nominated for Best Film, and Claire Bloom won the Most Promising Newcomer award. This proved farsighted, given the extent of Bloom's subsequent career. Even in the U.S., it was named one of the Top Ten Films for the year by the National Board of Review.
It was Chaplin's last hurrah. He did make two more films, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. The former did receive some praise due to its timely criticism of McCarthyism, but the latter was a dud.
Today, Limelight is well regarded. At imdb.com, it has a fairly high 10K user votes and an extremely high user rating of 8.1. Women over 45 give it an 8.9, no doubt pleased with the intense loyalty that Thereza shows to the man who saved her life, returned her to health, and helped make her a star. Audiences feel considerable sympathy for Chaplin and Keaton, although the former was wealthy and the latter had worked fairly steadily, and had been the star of a 1951 television series.
Contrary to popular belief, Limelight was the not the only occasion that Chaplin and Keaton appeared together, since they were previously in an obscure promotional silent short that hardly anyone living has seen. But it is certainly their only consequential pairing. Many viewers consider their skit as the film's highlight.
How I felt about it. It is too easy to dismiss Limelight as a sixtyish man's fantasy, particularly given Chaplin's scandals with younger women throughout his career (Chaplin's last child was born in 1962, when he was 73). In Limelight, Calvero gains a beautiful and much younger woman who loves him unconditionally, and even wants to marry him. But at least he shows no romantic interest in her, and encourages her potential romance with the younger and well mannered Neville.
Much of Limelight's dialogue consists of Calvero encouraging Thereza never to give up. There is something of A Star is Born role reversal later on, when the now-famous Thereza tries to uplift the spirits of the hard-luck Calvero. One has to wonder whether Calvero's life-is-wonderful platitudes directed toward Thereza were initially inspired by Chaplin self-encouragement. His career and reputation, at least in the U.S., were in rapid decline by 1952.
However autobiographical the film's themes, it has to be admitted that the movie is pretty good. Claire Bloom was a find, and appears radiant even when bedridden. Nigel Bruce is as blustery as ever, Sydney Chaplin is a charmer, and the elder Chaplin himself is sympathetic as a music hall performer who has fallen from the summit to the cellar.