Chaplin’s favorite Chaplin
Why has Charlie Chaplin’s final film, the graceful 1967 ship romance “A Countess From Hong Kong,” been so reviled?
For years, the obvious flaws and backstage drama of “Countess,” showing Sunday, Oct. 8, at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, have upstaged its sublimity. The negative opinions of Chaplin scholars like Eric L. Flom are typical: In his words, this “featherweight comedy” is supposedly “about nothing” and “has little significance in discussion of Chaplin and his films.” Their evidence is Chaplin’s overbaked dialogue and fake sets and an undeniably stiff Marlon Brando performance. As recently as this year, film historian Mark Harris conceded to general wisdom that “Countess” is “indeed awful.”
But “Countess,” which pushes its artifice like no other Chaplin film before it, actually provides a moving glimpse into the workings of Chaplin’s radically romantic mind. Here Chaplin moves
beyond the goals of “The Kid,” “City Lights,” and even “Monsieur Verdoux”— beautifully crafted films early in his career that aimed for aesthetic harmony. At this late stage in Chaplin’s life, “Countess” cannot be seen as a series of stagnant jokes. Like Jean Renoir’s last film “Le Petit Théâtre” (1970), “Countess” is like the artist’s deeply personal confessions in a diary, revealing Chaplin’s death wish: waltzing the night away.
“Countess” was the only time Chaplin directed established stars in lead roles. Brando, the face of the Hollywood Method, is both out of his element and perfect as an American ambassador who, while on a boat from Hong Kong to Hawaii, discovers a Russian royal stowaway and refugee (Sophia Loren) in his bedroom closet.
You could consider it a perverse, old-man’s folly that Chaplin, then in his late 70s, declared “Countess” “the best thing I’ve done.” But those willing to look deep into the glitches will find frighteningly sophisticated grace. Watching “Countess,” warts and all, with interested eyes will inspire the strange sensations Chaplin outlined in the opening questions of the film’s theme “This is My Song”: “Why is my heart so light? Why are the stars so bright?”
In “Countess,” Chaplin’s id runs rampant, replaying moments from across his career. Loren and Brando are female and male extensions of Chaplin: a reviled immigrant without a home, and a hounded, selfserving star for peace. Easygoing Loren (who got along with Chaplin more than Brando did) acts at a wider angle than the acute Brando, who, like his character, is sullen, self-important, disinterested in the scene. He is starchy and overworked, she more relaxed, their Russian-dolls postures along a proscenium arch recalling the zany stock types of Chaplin’s 1910s slapsticks.
Bodily functions such as Brando’s burping fits are finally acknowledged in Chaplin’s mannered cinema, but politeness is never far behind. A soft, honest moment: When Brando needs to relieve himself in his bedroom toilet, he turns up the volume on Loren’s bedside radio so that she doesn’t have to hear the noise.
Just because Chaplin goes uber-sentimental doesn’t mean he loses the political edge of “Monsieur Verdoux” (1947) or “Modern Times” (1936). Rather, his politics are subsumed into the romance of Loren and Brando; their unlikely, perhaps fleeting success is the world’s. Loren plays a countess, but she is also, crucially, a refugee, a displaced wanderer. A prostitute, a princess, a fake royal wife (to Brando’s butler and lawyer, but not Brando), a showboater and freeloader, Loren struggles to be herself until the very end. What some may view as repetitious and unfunny (the hunted countess always scrambling to return to the closet when she hears a harsh buzzing doorbell) is a stunningly subtle way of showing the Loren immigrant’s wanted-ness, her inability to live without threat of deportation from the boat.
Everyone in “Countess” just wants to dance. It’s not an obvious film to call a meditation on death, but the final tango seems the kind of haunting scene a director could only earn at the end of her life. “Countess,” like its characters, like life, is variable: light, airy, serious, sometimes comic, sometimes not, and devastatingly precarious in its depiction of security.
Chaplin’s “Countess” is not a film meant to be viewed in 100 minutes, but across 100 years — more or less, the length of a life. “The best thing I’ve done.” Sound perverse? Maybe in the future, it won’t.