had lost tremendous ground abroad because the European markets were all but closed during hostilities, leaving Holly wood’s export efforts concentrated on the United Kingdom and Latin America. European filmmaking was by necessity cut back dramatically while the war was on, but there were some remarkable examples of filmmaking under duress—notably Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, made during the occupation of Paris, and Roberto Rossellini’s stunning Rome, Open City, filmed while the Allied and Axis forces were shooting it out in the streets of Rome. With the end of the war there was suddenly a generous supply of foreign films pouring into the United States. American audiences were now finding their way to movies like Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, whose unvarnished honesty was a welcome change to the surfeit of overglamorized, manipulative Hollywood products, full of crashing Max Steiner scores, gauzy photography, and implausible happy endings. Pauline had fallen under the spell of de Sica and the other Italian neorealists while she was still involved with James Broughton. De Sica’s Shoeshine had actually been one of her indelible movie-going experiences:When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, “Well, I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel? . . . Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine, did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.
But it was a movie Pauline disliked that was to provide the unexpected turning point in this difficult phase of her life. In the fall of 1952, as she and a friend were sitting in a Berkeley coffeehouse arguing about a film they had both seen recently, sitting nearby was Peter D. Martin, who recently had launched a magazine, City Lights, devoted to film commentary. Martin was intrigued by the stream of articulate, independent opinion he heard Pauline expressing, and he asked her if she would like to review the new Chaplin picture, Limelight, for City Lights.
Limelight was a heavy-handed, strangely charmless tale of a down-at-the-heels English comic, Calvero (played by Chaplin), written off by his peers and public, who gets one last chance to show what he can do. The press treated it respectfully, but Pauline found it embarrassingly sentimental and, with its irritating references to Chaplin’s own neglect in Hollywood, nothing more than a testament to himself.
Her review reveals that her critical voice was still in the process of assembling itself, but all the intimations of what she would become are there. She wrote that Chaplin, at this point in his career, was playing to a “somewhat segmented art-film audience,” and no longer the mass audience that had thrilled to his performances as the Little Tramp. “When the mass audience becomes convinced that the clown who had made them laugh was really an artist, they felt betrayed,” she observed. She thought that Chaplin had become too serious, so that his view of his character, Calvero, was fatally high-minded: “The Chaplin of Limelight is no irreverent little clown; his reverence for his own ideas would be astonishing even if the ideas were worth consideration. They are not—and the context of the film exposes them at every turn.”
She thought the stage benefit that provides the climax of the film, in which Calvero proves that his comedic gifts have not deserted him after all and dies in the wings, was “surely the richest hunk of self-gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.” Chaplin, she felt, was trying to even the score with those who had attacked him for his morals or his politics, or those who had simply forgotten him. To her, the central conceit, the lie of the movie, was driven home in the scene in which Calvero praises the young ballerina (Claire Bloom) he has rescued: “My dear, you are a true artist, a true artist.” “The