Fiona got jealous of me watching A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG in ten minute sections by myself, and wanted to join in. After seven minutes she was ready to quit. But did laugh a couple times, more than I’d done in the first twenty minutes. Well, maybe I laughed three times, but all three of them were at the same gag, the flurry of activity triggered by the door buzzer. Pavlovian humour.
The third ten minutes of the film are devoted to Sophia trying to sleep on the couch while an increasingly grouchy Marlon tries to get her to use the bed, because he’s a gentleman. This chaste sex farce is somewhat anachronistic in ’67, seems to me. Though Sophia does use the word “prostitution.” Her character’s flight from poverty aligns with the star’s own biography and is the closest the film gets to emotional depth.
The main laugh was Brando’s devising of a secret knock, the old shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm, by which he assures Sophia that she’ll know it’s him. With very sharp timing, the knock comes at the door just as he finishes speaking, and of course it’s NOT him.
(I think the other main laugh was the buzzer again. Oh, and Fiona reminds me that Brando checking he has shorts on before answering the door was another.)
While much of the farce lacks speed/impetus, there’s one good slow bit where Sophia attempts to read while Marlon drums his fingers impatiently. It’s extended just long enough to be funny, and Sophia finds a few nice variations, or has been assigned them by Chaplin.
Long strange passage where Brando insists on loud music when he goes to the bathroom. This is apparently very discreet toilet humour, he wants to drown out whatever sounds he’s going to generate. I found it obscure on the one hand and vulgar on the other, but I guess that’s sort of the Lubitschian mode — handle delicately something which might be gross if handled bluntly, and you get both genteel good taste and a possibly humorous mismatch.
Brando supplies Sophia with yellow pyjamas, which provide her with outrageous baggy pants, which may remind us of someone we know. Any joie de vivre provoked by the canary-yellow Chaplinesque costume is wetblanketed by the depressing set. Pine wood at Pinewood. One thing that would be hugely improved if this were a thirties film as originally conceived: Charles D. Hall would have built a beautiful moderne ocean liner in opulent shades of cream.
And that’s about all that happens in minutes 20 to 30.
So, Marlon Brando meets a beautiful refugee on a boat… wait, we’ve done MORITURI.
Ah yes, this is A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG. Similar premise.
MORITURI showcases Brando’s great physical grace, and COUNTESS sadly doesn’t. If there were more visual comedy in it, or any, really, it would be interesting to see if Brando’s unusual combination of boxer’s physique and ballet dancer’s elegance could be harnessed for comic effect.
Instead we get Chaplin dialogue, lots of it. The chronology continues to be bonkers. Loren’s parents, she says, fled the Revolution and she was born in Shanghai. They died when she was thirteen, “Then there was another war, another revolution,” and that moved her to Hong Kong. Now, that doesn’t pin down her date of birth but it does suggest that she was at least thirteen when she moved as a result of WWII, the Chinese Revolution, or both. I guess it’s possible for COUNTESS to be set a couple of years earlier than its release date, for Loren’s character to be a few years older than she looks, and her displacement from Shanghai to have happened in 1949. But she does say “THEN there was another war,” which would mean she was 13 some time before 1939, which is not possible. And requires her mother to have been very young when she fled the Russian Revolution. It’s a bit of a mess.
Setting the movie in the 1930s, when it was written, might have been a better idea. Period grants a certain style. The movie certainly doesn’t want to be up-to-the-minute and trendy. Chaplin had enthused that “A good love story will never go out of fashion,” but this movie might seem to disprove that… if it were a good love story.
Brando and Loren dance, we fade to black, and when we fade up again Chaplin has elided a drunken night on the town complete with night club brawl. Which sounds a lot more interesting than anything before or after it. I can imagine Brando acting the hell out of that, though I don’t know if Brando fighting would be as funny as Chaplin fighting used to be. Maybe, if the gags were there.
Brando, hungover, learns that he’s being made ambassador to Saudi Arabia. We’ve all had mornings like that, I suppose. This respectable position will, it seems, be a cause of some dramatic or comic suspense later. Chaplin originally based the character of Ogden, according to his producer Jerome Epstein’s book, on Jack Kennedy, but switching things around after the assassination because nobody wanted to laugh at JFK being a philanderer. Supposedly a close friend of JFK told Chaplin it was an accurate portrayal, though.
Again, the possibilities are, if not quite tantalizing, at least enough to make me feel even grumpier about the film we ended up with. So I’ll cheer myself up by recounting the story Epstein pitched to Chaplin: an upstanding and stern judge discovers that his two teenage kids are tearaways causing all the havoc in town. “Charlie got very excited,” writes Epstein, “‘I could play the judge. It would make a marvelous vehicle for me. My big scene would be where they convert me into a hippy.'”
Now that sounds proper awful. But still, Chaplin’s answer to SKIDOO would arguably be more interesting, if also more deeply embarrassing, than what we have here. Anyway, Chaplin ultimately preferred to shoot the film he’d written rather than the one Epstein had just suggested.
It occurs to me that, while everybody in this movie would be good in another movie, and most of them had been, they’re ALL wrong for this movie. Old Ollie Johnston is fine, I guess, but Chaplin would have been better. Sidney Chaplin, despite genetics, is a serious middle-aged man when some sort of flippant rogue seems indicated.
Chaplin had been interested in the idea of Elizabeth Taylor for his leading lady, but Epstein dissuaded him: “Not for a comedy.” But I dunno, I think Liz had some comic chops. Then Chaplin saw YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW and thought Loren was brilliant. Rightly so. And Loren does have more moments of interest in this than Brando, but the material really isn’t there to support anyone.
Marlon takes off his tuxedo jacket and his lipsticked shirt and suddenly, in his vest, becomes the Brando we know. No opportunities here for THIS guy, though.
Patrick Cargill is an adequate substitute for Noel Coward, I guess… no he isn’t. He’s an appropriate substitute if you can’t get the real thing, but he remains a substitute. Coward was up for doing it, but the schedule got bumped due to Brando I think. Coward is funny — droll — whereas Cargill is, to me, a straight man (though in fact he was gay) who needs somebody else to get the laughs while he amplifies them, as in the famous Tony Hancock Blood Donor episode. So here we have a comedy with a cast of straight men and straight actors. Nobody shows any sign of wanting to be independently amusing until Margaret Rutherford and Angela Scoular turn up, terribly briefly and much later.
Chaplin’s elegant, romantic music accompanies Brando being detrousered by his valet, but the counterpoint doesn’t seem as pointed as when genteel music played for the Tramp’s low antics. Brando can move like a panther but his actions here are schlubby and unballetic.
Then the “Keystone farce comedy” begins with Loren discovered in Brando’s closet. He says “I beg your pardon,” walks away, and does what should be a double take but is more of a single. At most one and a half. The precision isn’t there. The problem may be that Brando is at his best doing truth and what this story demands from him is schtick. He started the shoot by remarking that this was the easiest film he’d ever done because all he had to do was copy Chaplin. But is he that kind of mimic?
Sophia has stowed away. Then, sixteen minutes in, I laugh for the first time, when the door buzzer goes and Brando reacts with fast turn. Actual farce energy! It’s true that farces take a bit of time to set up, you usually have to be patient — unless you also have jokes, visual gags and AMUSING CHARACTERS to make things funny right away. I recently had the honour of conducting what may have been actor Ian Lavender’s last interview, and he stressed the importance of logical absurdity. The plot needs to pressure the characters into doing ridiculous things to cover their mistakes/misdeeds or escape the misapprehensions/suspicions of others. I think you can do this with perfectly normal, unamusing people, but that leaves your first act rather dry. Farce with elegant, dignified people is, in effect, screwball comedy, which we don’t have here — because in a screwball, it’s immediately clear that the elegant, dignified people are also batty, quirky, childish, irresponsible. And FUN.
The buzzer goes again! Brando again very silly. All this movie needs is a buzzer to go every 40 seconds and we might have us a movie.
Sidenote: this is, for a luxury liner, quite a depressing room to be spending so much of the film in. The depressing pine-effect walls and gilt fringing call to mind a coffin.
Sidenote 2: Chaplin’s blocking, as much as his framing, calls to mind the spectre of the proscenium arch. There are certainly directors who like a planimetric composition, where the back wall runs parallel with the screen itself, but whose shots don’t reek of theatre. There are also ways of staging action so that everybody favours the camera with their front view or their best side, again without making us think we’re guilty creatures sitting at a play. Chaplin has never been the kind of director to overcome this issue. What allowed him to USE it, I think, was his extraordinary rapport with the lens and the prospective audience looking at what the lens has seen. This, his first film since A WOMAN OF PARIS in which he does not star, is missing someone with that facility. It has two very charismatic stars, but they’re trapped behind a fourth wall that’s stubbornly impregnable. It’s true that Chaplin slowly phased out those moments when he’d look right at us. But he never stopped being the kind of actor who one felt might, at any moment, tip us the wink.
A gag that really does not come off — when Loren threatens to allege Brando attacked her if he calls the purser, he startles her by moving suddenly forwards — but only to get his Alka-Seltzer. Chaplin is one of the few people who could, as a player, pull off this kind of misdirection (the cocktail shaker routine in THE IDLE CLASS). It doesn’t work when Conrad Veidt goes for the butter in THE SPY IN BLACK and it doesn’t work here. (If it were butter Brando were going for, we WOULD share Loren’s alarm.) The gag requires Brando to focus on Loren but then refocus on the Alka-Seltzer at the crucial moment, without us noticing the shift — he has to gaswash or brainlight us into thinking, retrospectively, that the effervescent pain relief and not the effervescent Italian star was always his objective.
Proof that Chaplin himself doesn’t think the gag is working comes when he cuts to a big Hitchcockian insert shot. You never cut during a visual gag — unless perhaps you’re doing a hyperbolic parody of an action movie, and even then, the single-take version is likely to be funnier. That’s why all those silent comedians had to risk, and occasionally break, their necks — the momentary visual interruption of a cut is enough to ruin the smoothness essential to delivery, like a stand-up fumbling a punchline. We hear what the stand-up says, we understand the meaning, but without the confident flow of words we don’t laugh.
The sodium bicarbonate is now making Brando belch, which ought to be funny in a low kind of way. Digestion always fascinates Chaplin. Playing the scene as melodrama but with sudden interruptive burps OUGHT to be pretty funny but for me the timing is off. And maybe the kind of actor Brando is works against it (again) — Cary Grant burping would be a shock, Warren Beatty burping would be a surprise, Brando burping is only one up from Wallace Beery, and I mean that with respect.
Brando steps outside the Trumpian white-and-gold suite for a moment (like a spacious coffin) into the corridor, which is even grimmer — dark bluish and narrow, a corridor built expressly to tilt sternwards and receive a fatal onrush of icy water.
Twenty minutes in, the buzzer goes again, Brando jumps again, there may be a law of diminishing returns here but IT’S ALL WE’VE GOT —
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.
shadowplay 