A Countess from Hong Kong

Charles Chaplin - 1967 - England

Hiding in a fake-looking ship stateroom set, Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando repeatedly exaggerate being startled, sit-com style, by knocks on the door. Whatever you do, don’t miss the hilarious scene where Brando, Loren and other characters stumble around, seasick, just because the ship hits some choppy water for a minute. And you’ll be doubled-over with laughter when Brando’s valet can’t figure out how to get under the covers of a bed for five minutes while an exasperated Loren watches in silence. Charles Chaplin’s cinematic swan-song, spectacularly announced as “An Original Screenplay Written and Directed by Charles Chaplin!,” is set up to be an auteur version of a Doris Day/Pillow Talk sex comedy, but it has very little of Chaplin’s legendary charm, no genuine humor, no insight, pathos, and worst yet, nothing cinematically compelling. Chaplin always claimed that he didn’t need interesting camera work because he was interesting, but - whether that’s true or not - he doesn’t star in this film, and his actors seem awkwardly pushed about like pawns on a chess board. At the nadir of his career, Brando phones his way through another mumbling, smirking non-performance. Garishly lit like a TV show, the film offers almost nothing to the viewer unless Sophia Loren’s décolletage is enough to excuse everything else, (and it may be). I don’t doubt that Chaplin’s artlessness is a stylistic choice, but I feel it’s a poor one. A film like this can’t be counted among contemporaneous and brazenly artificial works by other old masters like Howard Hawks’ Man’s Favorite Sport?, Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud and Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (all 1964), because it has no detectable signature, except possibly for a strained, unconvincing schmaltz that verges on Jerry Lewis territory. Speaking for myself, I didn’t laugh once, nor was I moved, nor was my eye caught by the masterly use of any basic filmmaking techniques such as composition, movement and editing. I will give it only this: I perked up briefly during a fascinating cameo by Chaplin’s daughter Geraldine, lasting a mere five seconds, in which she radiates the wistful earnestness that would later be used so well for humor and poignance in the films of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph.