I’ve been putting off THE COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG, the final stop in our Chaplin odyssey, as Tony Williams has noticed, for three reasons.
- I’ve written about it before.
- I didn’t really like it.
- When you get close to the end of a long journey, you like to pause, lest it be over too soon.
But here goes.
There’s an undeniable frisson as the Universal logo appears to a shiver of strings in the very recognizably emotive Chaplin manner. And part of what makes it exciting is the sense of bold anachronism — THIS music, in THIS era? I would like the film to carry on this timey-wimey discordance, and I suppose in a sense it does, as the Chaplin camera style has not greatly advanced since the 1910s.
Carrying on that sense of temporal overlay, we get an intertitle… can it really be called an intertitle when it appears at the beginning? I’m going to vote yes, because again, it’s appreciably olde-worlde in form. It LOOKS like a title from the silent era, even if it’s in a wider screen ratio. It also seems to imply that this film is set in the past, which it needs to be if it’s about refugees from two world wars.
Chaplin apparently came up with his story in the ‘thirties, as a vehicle for Paulette Goddard. And by referring to BOTH world wars he’s both admitting that ancient origin and trying to bring the thing up to date a bit. The more logical thing would be to pick a single world war and stick to it. Anyway, is this a period movie? Is Hong Kong really crowded with refugees twenty-two years after WWII ended? Wouldn’t they be residents by now?
The music has segued into stereotyped Chinese stuff, Hollywood-style, and the film opens with what looks to be second-unit or even stock footage. (Like that other late-career oddity EYES WIDE SHUT, the film is marked by its aging director’s reluctance to GO ANYWHERE.)
There’s more camera movement in this scenic/city stuff than we’ll get in the whole rest of the movie, I suspect. Still, we get fairly seamlessly out of a smoothish handheld shot “trucking” past neon signs, to a tilt down from a sign that says DANCING to the front of this particular dance hall, where a sign promises the chance to DANCE with a COUNTESS. Then we dolly in, and this is ASTONISHINGLY WOBBLY. I never knew it was possible to get a British camera crew to dolly so badly. There seems absolutely no reason for it to be so inept. Chaplin evidently didn’t want to lay tracks, but there’s no reason not to (apart from time, of course).
A sailor looks at the sign and goes in. We could possibly have dollied after him, but Chaplin simply cuts to a reverse angle indoors. Both this shot and the previous have a flat, planimetric approach redolent of silent days. Get used to it.
The conceit that every dame in the joint is a phony countess is mildly amusing, and Chaplin attempts to back it up with a montage of pleasant-looking gals:
This falls way short of where it needs to land. It could be an array of stunning exotic beauties, or an array of characterful hoydens, a la CABARET. Central Casting has come up with some moderately attractive English roses, the very thing the moment does not call for.
This place is not exactly bustling, either. There’s no Sternbergian sleaze or lushness, no cigarette smoke or occluding beads or streamers, nothing at all to add visual interest, and the heads are all framed centrally to make cropping for television simpler.
The promised DANCING begins, decorously, and the titles play:
Fewer mentions of Chaplin than usual — no music credit, and we abruptly fade out after Patrick Cargill’s card. (Last time I watched this it had a full title sequence here, what gives?)
Fade up on a grainy dockside.
Sidney Chaplin walks on the deck of this liner. Goes inside. Very big interior, one of the few times the movie looks expansive.
SC enters a room where Marlon Brando, our leading man, is rehearsing a speech about world peace, like he was a beauty queen. Sid goes to the nearest porthole and looks through binoculars. “Would you believe it, Hong Kong. By golly I can see a Chinaman there.” So we’re off to a flying start.
It’s not very surprising that a film from 1967 with a director who’s 78 should do a racism within the first four minutes, but it’s not exactly encouraging either. Sid now makes a speech about the poor taste displayed by the poor, which is an attempt at Wildean wit, not the worst dialogue ever, but rather heartless coming from the Little Tramp. It isn’t clearly positioned in such a way as to set up an attitude that will be challenged. But maybe it will be.
We learn that Brando, as “Ogden Meres” (sp?) is the son of the world’s richest oil man, and then we learn it all over again, to make sure. Something about the name “Ogden” indicates a writer trying too hard, just as “Wendell Armbruster III” in Wilder’s AVANTI! signals too heavily its American Abroad status.
Brando seems to have gone into this film with high hopes, explaining in interviews that his previous comedies had been none too hot, but that with Chaplin in charge all that would change. It’s uncertain when disillusion set in, but Brando claimed Chaplin was a sadist and he was appalled by the way he treated Sid. Sid, for his part, said he felt his dad was just trying to help him. Brando himself wasn’t entirely devoid of cruelty.
We’ve also been told that Brando liked to test his directors, giving two takes of a scene on day one, one where he put in the effort and one where he just walked through. If the director printed the wrong take, Brando would give up trying.
The thing is, though BEDTIME STORY is not a distinguished film, it is EXTREMELY funny in places and Brando is extremely funny in it, paired with David Niven, not an obvious match. Would that some of that fire ignited here.
Chaplin is not bent on exploiting the new license of the screen, but Sidney’s throwaway suggestion for alternative pursuits to politics — “Murder, arson, rape” — does step outside the bounds of cinematic discourse as it was known in Chaplin’s heyday. To modern ears, it also calls to mind Sidney’s namesake and uncle, the cannibal rapist Sydney Chaplin, but the less said of him the better.
Ogden’s secretary Crawford comes in with a wire. He thwaps the document lightly with his fingertips, as Shakespearean messengers are wont to do with their scrolls. It’s a ham gesture of the kind no real person ever indulges in, and Bill Nagy doesn’t seem like the kind of actor to do it off his own bat. I suspect he’s following his director’s instructions.
Patrick Cargill enters next, and one immediately gets the sense that this is an experienced farceur. Cargill is more of a comedy straight man, though, where perhaps if you have Brando as lead you might want, I dunno, more of an Eric Blore type? Just spitballing. But Cargill does certainly imply, by his presence, a certain humorous professionalism which we will need.
Then Oliver Johnston from A KING IN NEW YORK comes in — this scene is all about old guys coming through doors — and he’s another Cargill, an actor who can be relied on to amplify somebody else’s funny business, if only somebody else was doing something funny. I know, it’s early yet, Chaplin is quite entitled to merely set up his story and get the people in at this stage.
Some mild farce business — mistaken identity, then mistaken intentions. Brando is trying to get rid of Johnston on the assumption that he’s a bore, but Johnston is proposing a highstepping night on the two with Sophia Loren and a couple of her countess pals. the door opens again and in they come, to a burst of romance music wafting through from another era.
Each “countess” gets an inartistic closeup. Cameraman Arthur Ibbetson, who hasn’t shot a really convincing film since Bryan Forbes’ WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND, punches in from the same camera position by changing lens, even though angling around to suggest the Brando viewpoint would be eminently justifiable.
On the social media platform known as Twitter, George Joseph Gilbert PriscilaMariaVeronica White pondered whether the Pinewood sets for this film were recycled for DOCTOR IN TROUBLE (1970), an of Awful British Comedian film where the comedians are Leslie Phillips (another fine farceur) and Harry Secombe. Both ocean liner comedies feature Angela Scougal, Scoular, of whom more later. But the sets are not the same. They just FEEL the same.
The implication is that COUNTESS is an Awful British Comedian film in which the Awful British Comedian stays offscreen, plonked in the director’s chair. With its flat Pinewood look, Margaret Rutherford guest spot (she provided previous support for Norman Wisdom and Frankie Howerd), and half-hearted farce plotting, ACFHK does indeed sit adjacent to that subgenre, even if it was conceived in Hollywood in the 1930s, or maybe on Chaplin’s far east holiday to Singaopore.
There is some business with champagne, and somebody turns the romantic Russian music off — the first indication we’ve had that this score is dietetic, issuing from Brando’s hi-fi rather than being dropped onto the soundtrack from on high. It’s rather distracting.
Ballroom. Good view out the window, not as fake as one expects here. Don Ashton’s production design is not stunning but it is proficient. He did BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, not a small job. And Chaplin is moving the camera a little.
A pity Chaplin didn’t take Oliver Johnston’s role. It might not have helped much, but there would have been clear interest in him sharing the screen with Brando and Loren. Instead we just get a tantalising cameo.
Ollie tells us that the countesses are genuine and “their parents escaped to Shanghai during the Russian Revolution.” Which means this MUST be a period movie, and in fact it can’t even be happening after WWII, as that intertitle claimed. Or else Sophia’s parents escaped to Shanghai as infants, then met, married and had her when they grew up.
Sophia’s gorgeous co-countesses cannot act. AT ALL. And yet they are given lines, unnecessary lines, in which we learn for the third time that Marlon is a big oil man.
And we’re ten minutes in!
A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG stars Doctor Moreau; Filumena Marturano; Neville; Neville Chamberlain; Melanie Daniels; Harry, Scrooge’s Nephew; Ambassadore Jaume; Madame Arcati; Ruby; Opal; Midnight; Mavis Winkle; Diana Smallwood; Vivian Darkbloom; Zoot/Dingo; and Lord Helpus.
TO BE CONTINUED
shadowplay 