Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong Movie Review

As Charlie Chaplin entered the twilight of his life he struggled to get films made the way he was accustomed. Exiled from the United States, he no longer had the playground of his own studio to make films in the painstaking manner that was his style.  Because he was in thrall to a studio that was not his own, he had constraints in terms of budget and time. After leaving the United States for England in 1952 he only made two more films in the next 25 years.

We can possibly blame the quality of his final film, A Countess from Hong Kong, on this among several other factors. For Chaplin, A Countess from Hong Kong represented many firsts: first color film; first widescreen film (despite his ridiculing of the format in A King in New York); first comedy not starring himself; first time directing international movie stars. The effect of all these factors is a film that is both not funny as well as technically shoddy.

Classic Movie Review: The Graduate

Watching Mike Nichols’ classic The Graduate for the first time in about ten years or so I was struck by several things: Dustin Hoffman’s performance seems like preparation work for Rain Man; Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson was sexy and brilliant; the screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry is bitingly funny at times; Benjamin Braddock is not nearly the cultural revolutionary that I remembered him to be (or that he seemed to be in the 60s). While the film is undoubtedly a classic, it is hardly great.