Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest com­e­dy stars of the silent era, but as it hap­pened, they nev­er shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their col­lab­o­ra­tion did­n’t come about until 1952, the same year that Sin­gin’ in the Rain dra­ma­tized the already dis­tant-feel­ing advent of talk­ing pic­tures. That hit musi­cal deals with once-famous artists cop­ing with a chang­ing world, and so, in its own way, does Lime­light, the film that final­ly brought Chap­lin and Keaton togeth­er, deal­ing as it does with a washed-up music-hall star in the Lon­don of 1914.

A spe­cial­ist in down­trod­den pro­tag­o­nists, Chap­lin — who hap­pened to have made his own tran­si­tion from vaude­ville to motion pic­tures in 1914 — nat­u­ral­ly plays that star­ring role. Keaton appears only late in the film, as an old part­ner of Chap­lin’s char­ac­ter who takes the stage with him to per­form a duet at a ben­e­fit con­cert that promis­es the sal­va­tion of their careers. In real­i­ty, this scene had some of that same appeal for Keaton him­self, who had yet to recov­er finan­cial­ly or pro­fes­sion­al­ly after a ruinous divorce in the mid-nine­teen-thir­ties, and had been strug­gling for trac­tion on the new medi­um of tele­vi­sion.

Though Lime­light may be a sound film, and Chap­lin and Keaton’s scene may be a musi­cal num­ber, what they exe­cute togeth­er is, for all intents and pur­pos­es, a work of silent com­e­dy. Chap­lin plays the vio­lin and Keaton plays the piano, but before either of them can get a note out of their instru­ments, they must first deal with a series of tech­ni­cal mishaps and wardrobe mal­func­tions. This is in keep­ing with a theme both per­form­ers essayed over and over again in their silent hey­day: that of the human being made inept by the com­pli­ca­tions of an inhu­man world.

But of course, Chap­lin and Keaton’s char­ac­ters usu­al­ly found their ways to tri­umph at least tem­porar­i­ly over that world in the end, and so it comes to pass in Lime­light — moments before the hap­less vio­lin­ist him­self pass­es on, the vic­tim of an onstage heart attack. In the real world, both of these two icons from a bygone age had at least anoth­er act ahead of them, Chap­lin with more films to direct back in his native Eng­land and Europe, and Keaton as a kind of liv­ing leg­end for hire, called up when­ev­er Hol­ly­wood need­ed a shot of what had been redis­cov­ered — not least thanks to TV’s re-cir­cu­la­tion of old movies — as the mag­ic of silent pic­tures.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

When Char­lie Chap­lin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dic­ta­tor Speech Came About

30 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Char­lie Chap­lin came up in vaude­ville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mas­tery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skep­ti­cism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent pic­ture “a uni­ver­sal means of expres­sion,” where­as the talkies, as they were then known, “nec­es­sar­i­ly have a lim­it­ed field.” Nev­er­the­less, he was too astute a read­er of pub­lic tastes to believe he could stay silent for­ev­er, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — lit­er­al­ly, in the case of Mod­ern Times. In that cel­e­brat­ed film, his icon­ic char­ac­ter the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unin­tel­li­gi­ble hash of cod French and Ital­ian, and yet still some­how gets his mean­ing across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.

That scene appears in the Cin­e­maS­tix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent come­di­an opens his mouth,” which comes not in Mod­ern Times but The Great Dic­ta­tor, Chap­lin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascen­dant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chap­lin plays two roles: the nar­row-mus­ta­chioed Hitler par­o­dy Ade­noid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonal­ly and rhyth­mi­cal­ly con­vinc­ing ersatz Ger­man, and a Tramp-like Jew­ish Bar­ber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines come at the film’s very end.

Dressed as the dic­ta­tor in order to escape the camp, the Bar­ber sud­den­ly finds him­self giv­ing a speech at a vic­to­ry parade. When he speaks, he famous­ly does so in Chap­lin’s nat­ur­al voice, express­ing sen­ti­ments that sound like Chap­lin’s own: inveigh­ing against “machine men with machine minds,” mak­ing a plea for lib­er­ty, broth­er­hood, and good­will toward men.

Though it may have been Chap­lin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dic­ta­tor isn’t his most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed pic­ture. When it was made, the Unit­ed States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe had­n’t yet come to light. This film’s rela­tion­ship with actu­al his­tor­i­cal events thus feels uneasy, as if Chap­lin him­self was­n’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his cli­mac­tic speech was only cre­at­ed as a replace­ment for an intend­ed final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writ­ing and revis­ing over a peri­od of months. It’s more than a lit­tle iron­ic that The Great Dic­ta­tor is main­ly remem­bered for a scene in which a com­ic genius to whom words were noth­ing as against image and move­ment for­goes all the tech­niques that made him a star — and indeed, for­goes com­e­dy itself.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Char­lie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dic­ta­tor: A State­ment Against Greed, Hate, Intol­er­ance & Fas­cism (1940)

Char­lie Chap­lin Finds Com­e­dy Even in the Bru­tal­i­ty of WWI: A Scene from Shoul­der Arms (1918)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

How Char­lie Chap­lin Used Ground­break­ing Visu­al Effects to Shoot the Death-Defy­ing Roller Skate Scene in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.