Charles Chaplin made Limelight at the most troubled period of his adult career. In the late 1940s, America¹s Cold War paranoia reached its peak, and Chaplin, as a foreigner with liberal and humanist sympathies, was a prime target for political witch-hunters. It did not help that he had recently been cited in an unseemly paternity suit. Pilloried as he was by the right-wing press and reactionary institutions like the American Legion, it seemed that America had turned against the man it had once idolised.
In this atmosphere, his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux, with its sardonic view of war, was attacked as being anti-American. Not surprisingly, then, in choosing his next subject he deliberately sought escape from disagreeable contemporary reality. He found it in bitter-sweet nostalgia for the world of his youth - the world of the London music halls at the opening of the 20th century, where he had first discovered his genius as an entertainer.
His story concerns a once-famous comedian who has lost the ability to command his audience. Chaplin said that he based the character on real-life stage personalities whom he had seen lose their gifts and their public - the American black-face comedian Frank Tinney (1878-1940) and the Spanish clown Marceline (1873-1927) with whom he had himself worked as a boy. Clearly he was also thinking of his own present bitter experience of a faithless public.
Chaplin spent more than two years writing Limelight. His method was remarkable, and unique in his work. As a preliminary, he wrote the story in the form of a full-length novel - some 100,000 words long and entitled "Footlights". The novel - never published or apparently even intended for publication - relates the story as it appears in the finished film, but in addition includes two separate biographies of Calvero and Terry, detailing their lives before the action of the film proper begins.
What makes these biographies so remarkable is that we can trace in them a great deal of extended autobiography, as Chaplin quite openly introduces episodes from his own life and those of his parents. Just like Chaplin¹s own father, Calvero is devastated when he discovers his wife¹s infidelity and drifts into alcoholism. In the novel, Calvero even dies in the same hospital - St Thomas’ on the banks of the Thames - where Charles Chaplin Senior died in 1901 at the age of only 37.
The character of Terry, the young dancer, was equally clearly based on Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, though with reminiscences too of Chaplin’s first and never forgotten love, Hetty Kelly.
Claire Bloom, who plays Terry, remembered that in rehearsing her, Chaplin was always recalling gestures of his mother or Hetty, and the clothes they wore. With this strong underlay of nostalgia, Chaplin was at pains to evoke as accurately as possible the London he remembered from half a century before. In this he was helped by the great Russian-born designer, Eugene Lourié, who remodelled a set on the Paramount lot to look like a Victorian London street. A permanent setting of a theatre at RKO-Pathe was decorated to look like the Empire Theatre, London’s grandest music hall.
For the climactic scene Chaplin planned a ballet, in which Claire Bloom - not a dancer herself - was doubled by Melissa Hayden, a star of the New York City Ballet. Since the coming of sound films, Chaplin had always composed his own music scores, with the assistance of arrangers. Exceptionally, the music for the ballet - 25 minutes, though it was reduced in the final film - had to be composed in advance. Chaplin was relieved when Melissa Hayden and her partner and fellow star André Eglevsky assured him that the music was suitable for choreography. The "Limelight theme" was to remain one of Chaplin’s best-loved compositions; and in 1972, twenty years after the film’s first release, he and his musical collaborators Ray Rasch and Larry Russell were awarded a belated Oscar for "Best Original Dramatic Score".
The beautiful, 20-year-old English stage actress Claire Bloom was chosen to play Terry after much soul-searching; and Chaplin’s son Sydney was given the secondary male role. Perhaps it was a comfort in these difficult days - and an element of the nostalgia - to have his family around him: four other children and his half-brother Wheeler Dryden also played in the film, and even his young wife Oona doubled for Claire Bloom in two brief shots. Though Chaplin’s public life was beset by problems, the shooting of Limelight at least was trouble-free and completed in 55 shooting days an exceptional standard of economy for Chaplin’s feature productions. The premiere was, appropriately, held in London on 16 October 1952. In Chaplin¹s absence, open official hostility in America escalated to a point where he decided not to return to "that unhappy country". Thereafter he made his permanent residence in Europe. At that moment Chaplin believed that Limelight would be his last film. It was not: but if it had proved so, this exercise in nostalgia and family autobiography would have been a fitting conclusion to his career.
参考资料:http://www.charliechaplin.com/article.php3?id_article=8
Charlie Chaplin was born Charles Spencer Chaplin in London, England on 16 April 1889. His parents, Charles Chaplin, Sr and Hannah Hill were music hall entertainers but separated shortly after Charlie was born, leaving Hannah to provide for her children. In 1896 when Hannah was no longer able to care for her children, Charlie and his brother Sydney were admitted to Lambeth Workhouse and later, Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children.
Charlie had already debuted in the music hall in 1894, when he had sung a song after his mother was taken hoarse.
1903-1906
Performs in Sherlock Holmes, as the newspaper boy Billy
1906-1907
The Casey Circus
1907-1910
Works with the Karno Pantomime Troupe
1910-1912
First tour of USA/Canada with Karno Troupe
1912-1913
Second tour of USA/Canada with Karno Troupe
May 1913
Accepts offer from Adam Kessel (who has interests in the Keystone Film Company) for $125/week
29 December 1913
Signs contract with Keystone
Jan/Feb 1914
Charlie Chaplin's first film: Making a Living
1914
Keystone films
Nov 1914
Signs with Essanay for $1,250/week to make 14 films during 1915
1915
Essanay films
27 Feb 1916
Signs with Mutual Film Corporation for $10,000/week plus $150,000 bonus
1916-1917
Mutual films
17 June 1917
Signs with First National Exhibitor's Circuit for $1,075,000/year
??
First National Films
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was considered the greatest scientist of the 20th century and one of the greatest of all time. His discoveries and theories have greatly influenced science in many fields.
Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, a city in Germany. As a boy, he was slow to learn to talk, but later in his childhood he showed great curiosity about nature and ability to solve difficult mathematical problems. After he left school, he went to Switzerland, where he graduated from the university with a degree in mathematics.
In 1905, Einstein began to publish a series of papers which shook the whole scientific and intellectual world, and for the theories he established in the papers he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.
Because Einstein was Jewish, when Hitler took over Germany in 1933, he had to leave the country and finally settled in the United States. There he continued his study on the structure of the universe until his death in 1955.
Among the several important discoveries Einstein made in his life, the greatest is the creation of his famous Theory of Relativity
chaplin is a humurous person do not you think so?
小样儿,把作业题都搬上来了啊,你强,但不要害了自己哈
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