Thirty years ago Chaplin had encompassed tragi-comedy with a purity of form and feeling unique in the cinema, and from a historical point of view the qualities of Limelight are beautifully logical; what is less logical, perhaps, is the intense success with which they have been realised. At 63 Chaplin has executed an imaginative portrait of the artist as an old man and shown his creative powers to be at their height. The cinema is apt to exhaust its great talents early, but Limelight has all the vitality and sureness of Chaplin's best work, and it touches some new moments of experience. (p. 123)

The poetic unity of Limelight is a deep, calm, fatal emanation of sadness…. (p. 124)

The directness of sentiment in Limelight has found its detractors, as direct sentiment always does; nothing exposes an artist more. It is easy enough to write about today's Chaplin as "sententious" …, as "self-pitying" … or "self-infatuated" …, but these charges seem to reflect a temperamental dislike of the film's approach rather than to refute it. They miss the essential thing, the passion which is the motive and the justification of Limelight. Nothing could be truer to itself; the difference is in the identification point. Charlie the tramp, the anarchist, was everyone's symbol, and Chaplin since The Great Dictator has ceased to be that. In his last three films he has become articulate, and become a particular person. The fact that The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux did not make the transition completely, that they were manifestly imperfect films, may account for the unwillingness of many to appreciate what Chaplin was trying to do. Because Chaplin tells the story of Limelight, as of most of the other films, in simple and superficially old-fashioned terms, it has been assumed that the emotions which go with it are old-fashioned…. But to condemn this only reflects the naive fallacy that any age is artistically self-contained, and that true "contemporary" art must discard all traditional methods. The revolutionary artist is not the only valid one; what counts on the personal level is the artist's own imagination and technique, whether stimulated by tradition or repelled by it. (pp. 124-25)

Within the story itself there is no slapstick, but a certain amount of traditional comedy and, in the dialogue, of irony; the actual world of the clown is separated into the musichall acts. In this way Limelight has far more unity than Verdoux, which veered from farce to sentiment, satire to caricature, and lost, I think, the singleness of purpose its subject demanded. Limelight shows Chaplin the actor and Chaplin the film-maker equally prominent. He uses dialogue and sound with as much mastery as he brought to silent film-making at the peak of his career in City Lights. As a director, Chaplin's talent has often been under-rated; his best films have always been carefully constructed, the simplicity of their continuity is disciplined, and his use of the camera for recording physical action no less remarkable in its way than that of [Erich von] Stroheim or [Georg] Pabst…. Of the major films, only in Modern Times, The Dictator and Verdoux—which will, I believe, seem in perspective the most transitional of his career, the gradual elimination of Charlie being a rather intellectual process and reflecting, especially in the sometimes shrill bitterness of Verdoux, the lack of emotional shelter which he found in Limelight—is the style considerably less satisfying. (p. 125)

The comedy in Limelight continues the line of sophistication drawn in parts of Verdoux. We are made conscious of two conventions; of the old-fashioned London music-hall, and of Chaplin's own pantomime style, a deviation from it. The final sequence with Buster Keaton, classically abstracted as ever, is probably the "straightest" comedy turn in the film, with its gags impeccably accumulated both in the action and the use of the camera. Yet even here Chaplin's demonic fiddler, a sort of Mephisto Waltz parody, suggests a diversion. The difference seems to be that Charlie's humour was the humour of a figure who had become a universal symbol, and that in Limelight, in keeping with the rest, the comedy is the comedy of character. (p. 126)