文档介绍:Chaplin
British-born actor, director, and producer who gained fame for his role as a tramp in baggy trousers and a bowler hat. His productions include The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931).
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.
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.
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 politi