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 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.