Footlights, the screen legend's unseen prequel in prose to the film Limelight, reflects his sadness at declining stardom
Out of Limelight … Chaplin in a still from the eponymous film. Photograph: W Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures
The only work of prose fiction ever written by Charlie Chaplin, a dark, nostalgic novella which was the root of his great film Limelight and which has languished unpublished for over 60 years, is being made public for the first time.
Footlights, which runs to 34,000 words, traces the same story as Chaplin's valedictory film Limelight, that of an aging, alcoholic clown Calvero, and the ballerina he saves from suicide. The film, in which Chaplin played Calvero and Claire Bloom the ballerina, was the final American movie Chaplin made before he was banned from the country for alleged communist sympathies. The novella, which Chaplin wrote in 1948, before the film script, widens and deepens the story, giving an insight into the author's state of mind at the time.
It has lain in Chaplin's archive for decades, but has now been pieced together from a mix of handwritten and typed scripts by Chaplin's biographer David Robinson. It is published by the Cineteca di Bologna, an Italian film restoration institute which has been digitising the Chaplin archive for the Chaplin family.
More
And at The New York Times
Footlights, which runs to 34,000 words, traces the same story as Chaplin's valedictory film Limelight, that of an aging, alcoholic clown Calvero, and the ballerina he saves from suicide. The film, in which Chaplin played Calvero and Claire Bloom the ballerina, was the final American movie Chaplin made before he was banned from the country for alleged communist sympathies. The novella, which Chaplin wrote in 1948, before the film script, widens and deepens the story, giving an insight into the author's state of mind at the time.
It has lain in Chaplin's archive for decades, but has now been pieced together from a mix of handwritten and typed scripts by Chaplin's biographer David Robinson. It is published by the Cineteca di Bologna, an Italian film restoration institute which has been digitising the Chaplin archive for the Chaplin family.
More
And at The New York Times
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