☆ ☆ ☆ ½
A
King in New York (1957) – C. Chaplin
Chaplin’s last starring vehicle (and
penultimate directing effort) is a satirical swipe at the country that just
kicked him out (for communist sympathies and moral transgressions). He plays a European king who has escaped a
revolution by fleeing to New York City where he discovers that he is broke,
having been fleeced by a member of his government. To make ends meet (staying in the Ritz
Hotel), he starts endorsing products and starring in TV commercials (falling
into this rather fortuitously). On one
of his charitable visits to a boys’ school he meets a kid whose parents are
communists (eventually sentenced to prison by HUAC); when he ends up looking
after the boy (played by his real son Michael Chaplin) when he’s run away from
the school, he too is accused of being a communist (ironic since he is a
royalist). These are the basic facts of
the plot, but as usual with Chaplin the film is more or less a series of gags
sewn together hanging on this loose structure.
The Americans seen in the film are often gauche, obsessed with body
hygiene (“you are giving me a complex!”), and, of course, insanely concerned
about communism. Chaplin’s script takes
potshots at TV, widescreen films, plastic surgery, the atomic bomb, and
more. Perhaps it isn’t always funny and
probably it doesn’t always cohere – but there is enough here to keep you interested
and Chaplin is never less than charismatic.
And, at the end, when you discover that the young boy has been forced to
name names to get his parents out of prison, you feel that Chaplin has sadly
hit the bullseye (and he looks directly at the camera to let you know he knows). That said, this film fails to scale the
heights of Monsieur Verdoux (1947), his last great (and very dark) masterpiece.
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