Limelight Out

No sooner had three West Coast Fox theaters booked Charles Chaplin's Limelight than one of Hollywood's most feared critics, the American Legion, went to work. After visits from the local Legion post and from representatives of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (president: Cinemactor Ward Bond), the theaters (Grauman's Chinese, the Downtown and El Rey in Los Angeles) decided to substitute Niagara for Limelight rather than chance the Legion's pickets.

The Legion, the theaters explained, feels that the picture should be banned until the Department of Justice has completed its investigation of Chaplin. Other exhibitors were puzzled by the Legion's belated and localized action; Limelight has been playing in more than 60 cities in the U.S. and Canada for four months without so much as a mild admonition.

Last week the Legion's disapproval of the Chaplin film got powerful support. Wrote RKO Radio's Howard Hughes to John D. Home, chairman of the Hollywood Legion Post's Un-American Activities Committee: "I am a director of the distributing unit of RKO, and I assure you that this company has not touched . . . Limelight in any way whatsoever and has no intention of doing so ... The incident you referred to in your letter is the booking of Limelight by the RKO Theaters Corp. This is a separate corporation . . . Nevertheless ... I have been making a most concerted effort to persuade the management of the theater corporation to take the necessary legal measures to cancel all bookings of Limelight."

To moviegoers who have not yet had a chance to see Limelight and judge it on its own merits, the Legion stand appeared highhanded. Editorialized the New York Herald Tribune: ". . . The Legion has made the cardinal error of attacking the art in place of the artist . . . To make rude remarks about movies you do not like is an American privilege. But to suppress them ... is not such a privilege, and it is not good sense . . . Charles Chaplin's political activities, if any, can be dealt with at the proper place and time, but to drag his movie into the indictment is oppressive and ill-advised."

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