Coming after Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight is as much a mea culpa as any Soviet artist's return to the bosom of Stalin. It is a return to the bosom of the bourgeoisie, and it is expressed in the quintessen-tially bourgeois form of entertainment: sentimental domestic drama. This form doesn't stop an artist being pretentious—as students of Chaplin's late father-in-law know to their cost. And in Limelight, the high-flown sentimentality of Mr. Chaplin's drama has a lethal partner in the academicism of an Eglevsky ballet.

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. The exhortations in the directions of life, courage, consciousness, and "truth" are set in a story line of the most self-pitying and self-glorifying daydream variety. Calvero's gala benefit in which he shows the unbelievers who think him finished that he is still the greatest performer of them all, his death in the wings as the applause fades--this is surely the richest hunk of gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.