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.

Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York Movie Review

A King in New York is probably Charlie Chaplin’s most deeply personal film. Though he claimed he was just trying to make people laugh with another comedy film, there is no denying the overt political arguments he makes with his screenplay. The film is undoubtedly critical of the United States and its policies in the 1950s regarding political party affiliation. A King in New York was Chaplin’s first film made outside America because he’d already been exiled from the country he called home for almost forty years. His exile was the result of allegations that he was a member of the Communist Party. By all accounts, Chaplin loved America and was devastated when he was not permitted to return. With that in mind, we can read A King in New York as a cathartic experience for Chaplin to have made it when he did.

Charlie Chaplin's Limelight Movie Review

Buster Keaton (left) makes a brief appearance as Calvero's partner on the stage.

As Charlie Chaplin’s popularity began to fade his work output slowed considerably. He took longer and longer to complete scripts. His script for Limelight took him about four years to finish. In it he explores the effects of an irrelevant career on an aging Vaudeville performer. Chaplin plays Calvero, a once great Music Hall entertainer who now finds himself receding into obscurity as the world moves on around him. The film takes place in 1914, presumably on the eve of the First World War, but the amount of time that seems to pass in the narrative suggests that the war should have begun during its course. Yet there is no mention of war at all. This is a mistake, I think, because the presence of the war could have added a very real dimension to the Calvero’s downfall. As the world teetered on the brink, who had time for music halls and stage entertainment? Chaplin’s own fall from grace similarly coincided with the start of WWII.

Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux Movie Review

The only film for which Charlie Chaplin grew a real mustache.

The vast majority of silent film stars faded into obscurity rather quickly with the advent of synchronized sound. Directors tended to fare better as their craft was built around telling stories. We forget (or in most cases don’t know) that John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock started in silent films. Actors tended to have the most trouble transitioning to sound films. Charlie Chaplin was most famous for his iconic tramp character who was necessarily a silent character. He made some headway by continuing to make artistically viable and successful films in the silent tradition with City Lights and Modern Times. But eventually something had to give.

The Great Dictator was his first dialogue-driven film, but even that had strong roots in the silent traditions. Truly it was not until Monsieur Verdoux in 1947 when Chaplin released his first film conceived entirely as a talking picture. Think for a moment about how incredible that is – that’s fully 20 years after the beginning of the talkies.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin was ahead of his time in most respects when it came to his filmmaking. The greatest irony being that he was late to the game when it came to making talking films. His first film conceived and made completely with dialogue was The Great Dictator, released in 1940 – more than a decade after the advent of synchronized sound and dialogue. But even if he was the last significant holdout clinging to silent film, The Great Dictator was well ahead of the curve in terms of world politics.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times

At a time when synchronized sound was the standard in moviemaking, there was increasingly less room for the silent stars, especially comedians who relied so heavily on pantomime to make their comedy work. Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character was universal in being voiceless and without language he had no firm ties to a particular geographic location. He could be Russian or Japanese or Brazilian. The sentimentality of his stories could be understood anywhere in the world. Chaplin’s last completely silent feature film, City Lights, was released in 1931, four full years after Al Jolson’s profession, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” in The Jazz Singer ushered in a new era for motion pictures. Chaplin made Modern Times between 1932 and 1936 and though it is for all intents and purposes a silent film, it does utilize sound effects, a synchronized musical score and some spoken dialogue. It was Chaplin’s way of sticking to the type of film making he knew best while giving a small tip of the hat to the new mode.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's City Lights

As the cinematic rival of the stoic Buster Keaton it was Charlie Chaplin who infused his comedic work with great pathos through his perennial character of The Little Tramp. Chaplin constantly strove for that perfect balance between a lovably goofy man-child and moments of grand emotion. Never did he accomplish the blend so symmetrically and effortlessly it seems as with City Lights. It just might be his best work.

Made after the advent of synchronized soundtracks for films and at a time when studios had completely abandoned silent cinema, Chaplin insisted City Lights remained silent with respect to dialogue, retaining the custom of inter-titles because The Little Tramp was a universal character. He could be understood across cultures, across borders, across languages. Not to mention that every individual around the world who knew the character would have given him, in their own heads, a voice only they knew. To strip that all away would have been to unravel part of what made him so special.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Circus

The Circus is probably Charlie Chaplin’s best pure comedy feature. It doesn’t have the same dramatic level as his earlier The Kid or his follow-up City Lights. It’s no wonder this is the only Chaplin film that won any significant Academy Award (notwithstanding the fact that 1928 was the first year the Oscars were bestowed). The Academy removed his film from consideration as a nominee in four major categories and decided instead to award him an Honorary Oscar for producing, directing, writing and acting The Circus. It’s a film that perfectly sums up the Tramp as a character.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush

This review is based on the original 1925 version of The Gold Rush with accompanying music provided on the DVD. In 1943 Charles Chaplin personally supervised a re-release version with original musical score and voiceover narration provided by Chaplin himself.

It’s hard enough these days to get easily engrossed in a silent feature film. The classics are worth watching, especially if you’re at all interested in understanding the development of narrative form on screen. It takes a great deal of mental focus and a commitment that you’re going to stick it out through more than an hour of silent viewing. Surely, just as with subtitled films, the more you watch them, the easier it gets. But I find Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to be, at times, tedious viewing. It has great classic bits, but the story that holds it together is occasionally thrown together in a ramshackle way.

Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris Movie Review

In 1923 Charlie Chaplin released his second feature film, A Woman of Paris. Although this film is all but forgotten because Chaplin is remembered for his classic comedies, there is a lot of value in this rare drama from one of the greatest clowns of the silent era. Chaplin had wanted to create a serious drama for his long time leading lady Edna Purviance, who had starred alongside him in a great number of comedies. As she got older and more mature, he felt she was no longer suited to comedic roles.

Classic Movie Review: Charlie Chaplin's The Kid

Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid is unique among his films in that it’s the only time we see the Tramp as a family man. Normally he’s on his own and breezing through life. Occasionally there’s a girl and sometimes he even wins her in the end. But to see the Tramp with a child to care for reveals a side of the character unseen either before or after.

To be sure, the Tramp comes to fatherhood like most things in his life – unwillingly and unwittingly. At the start of the film a young woman leaves a charity hospital with baby in arms. Destitute and without means to care for the infant she leaves it in the car of a wealthy man. Regretful a short time later she returns, but the car has been stolen by two thieves who leave the baby in an alley. This series of coincidences leads to the Tramp finding the baby. He picks it up believing it belongs to a passerby. Yet one more coincidence – a passing beat cop – precludes the possibility he can put the child back in the alley. And so a father is born.

Charlie Chaplin Focus: Reviews of 4 Short Films for Mutual

These four short comedies by Chaplin are from volume 3 of a three volume set known as The Chaplin Mutuals comprising all 12 comedies he made for the Mutual company in 1916.

In Chaplin’s first short film for Mutual, The Floorwalker, he plays a customer in a retail store who becomes unwittingly mixed up in an embezzlement scheme involving the store’s manager and floorwalker. This is made possible by his uncanny resemblance to the floorwalker which provides for an oft repeated (most famously by the Marx brothers) classic bit in which Chaplin and his doppelganger (Lloyd Bacon) play like they’re each looking in a mirror at the other. What starts as another episode of the bumbling Tramp acting the fool becomes a classic mistaken identity comedy as the store manager (Eric Campbell) takes him for the man who betrayed him for the cash embezzlement. The Floorwalker is notable for being the first film to use an escalator for comedy which provides Chaplin some great physical comedy centered on one character chasing another down the ‘up’ escalator with neither of them moving anywhere. The climax features an elevator as well, the two working together to add a new level to Chaplin’s comedic work.

Charlie Chaplin Focus Starts Now

Last November I decided to take on the task of looking at a selection of Charlie Chaplin's feature film work as my focus for December. It quickly ballooned into including his short films as well because several were available on DVD at my local library. The onset of the end of year films and the Oscars kept me busy with other film viewing and I kept putting off my Chaplin focus. Finally this month I've been able to get through a large chunk of his work.

I can count ten of his short films and 11 of 12 feature films on the list of what I've seen. The Pilgrim is the only feature I've not been able to get either through the library or Netflix. But I've watched all the rest. There are still some short films I plan to watch before finishing this long and drawn out project.