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Sid James, appearing in A KING IN NEW YORK as “Johnson – TV advertiser”, is hardly a Madison Avenue smoothie. Edinburgh-born Hugh McDermott, who appears elsewhere in the film and who was likewise a bit of a specialist in pseudo-yank roles, would have been better casting, but I think Chaplin sees the business as inherently vulgar and so who better than Sid? Dawn Addams can stand in for the industry’s classier side.

I have in the past been guilty of confusing Eric James, who transcribed Chaplin’s humming and orchestrated it into this film’s score, with Eric Rogers, who composed a bunch of the Carry On films. James also served the same function for Lionel Bart’s Oliver! since Bart, like Chaplin, couldn’t read musical notation. James would also help Chaplin score most of his later silent films.

It’s a shame that Sid is given relatively little comedy to do, but then it’s a shame that the film itself has so little comedy.

Dawn turns up again bearing a cheque in payment for King Shadhov’s involuntary TV appearance. He tears it up, but then there’s a nice reversal when he learns his bank balance is low — he tips out the waste paper basket and calls for “sticking plaster” — I don’t think that’s the right term, Charlie, but we know what you mean.

Then King Shadhov must tour an orphanage, which comes slightly out of the blue but holds promise — surely some echo of Chaplin’s own days in the workhouse is intended? It’s a period Chaplin often spoke and wrote about, but it’s unrepresented in his films, save for the threat of institutional charity in THE KID. I’m reminded also that David Robinson records that, when Chaplin revisited England and was expected to tour his former Kennington orphan asylum, he opted instead to dine with royalty. One can see how that might be more enjoyable, but the kids were expecting him.

Among the orphaned kids here, ironically, is Chaplin’s son Michael. He has just published his first novel. Apparently his earlier memoir, I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on my Father’s Lawn, was substantially ghosted. He says he enjoyed making this film and it gave him a chance at a closer relationship with his distant and domineering dad than he’d been able to achieve earlier.

He’s quite good. His character, Rupert Macabee, has been inculcated with leftist political blarney by his parents, who are now incarcerated on treason charges. So he spews this communist verbiage, helplessly, his eyes panicked as if he has no say in what comes yammering out of his little mouth. It’s a clever — and deniable — way for Chaplin to get his subversive views across onscreen. Shadhov wouldn’t say this stuff, any more than the Jewish barber would make his big speech at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR. Michael is maybe the best thing in this film. He even has his own leitmotif, which plays almost every time he appears.

The rest of the orphanage scene is unremarkable. Shadhov being targeted by pea-shooters is too mild to be amusing, and even the sitting in a cake pay-off lacks the element of outrageousness needed to get a strong laugh. The highlight is actually Shadhov’s earlier revenge on his persecutor, tipping a bowl of soup over the brat’s head and then massaging it in, all while keeping up his argument with young Macabee/Michael.

When Shadhov returns to his hotel, his trousers have made a remarkable Tom & Jerry type recovery — a missed opportunity, since obviously having Shadhov still waddling about with a sodden and creamy rump would have been good for a laugh. Keep him uncomfortable and confectionary-smeared when Dawn shows up again, Sid James in tow: force him to explain his arse.

TO BE CONTINUED

Shahdov Play

Yes… I have rather neglected A KING IN NEW YORK, after blogging about the opening subtitle. Maybe it’s the dread of having to rewatch A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG, or maybe it’s anxiety about how I’ll feel about this film itself?

Chaplin has literally named himself Shadow, here, or nearly — he’s named himself King Shahdov. It’s fairly explicit that he’s a shahdo ov his former self. I’d puzzled over Chaplin’s reversal of his stated opposition to dictators — “Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the world!” Suddenly he’s playing a seemingly sympathetic monarch. I guess monarchs are born into it, rather than seeking it, so he classes them differently.

Chaplin had, five years before, been booted out of the U.S. Shadhov reverses that by being booted out of his native land — actually, fleeing, with the nation’s riches — into the U.S. So autobiography, as usual, is strongly present. But there might be alternative readings. Maybe, for instance, New York in this movie could be a stand-in for Switzerland, the nation Chaplin actually fled to, or the UK, the country he originally came from and where he returned, briefly, to make this film. He couldn’t stay long for tax reasons, so this movie was shot quicker than other CC joints.

Here is the budget top sheet.

“The fact that we have not had a script to work from has been a very considerable handicap.” I wonder when the script eventually showed up.

Chaplin is apparently being paid living expenses only?

“Sexy girl – £100.”

No Completion Fee (I guess this is what we’d now call a completion bond — without it, there’s less of a safety net but since the completion bond guarantor’s usual main recourse is to fire the director, and that’s not an option here since he’s also the star, it seems a reasonable saving).

If there was a fifth page, it seems to be missing.

I was given the budget by Lawrie Knight, who filched it oyt of a drawer at Pinewood when he worked as an assistant director. I gifted it to David Robinson in gratitude for his giving up his seat to me at the closing gala of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

The “Estrovians” in this film — a neighbour of Tomania and Bacteria and Austerlich? — are played by Brits, which is convenient for the budget but also consistent with Chaplin playing their King. He doesn’t get any real laughs out of his arrival and press conference, though again it has autobio signif. The business with his prime minister absconding with his loot is mere plot. It’s only when the King sgteps out for a night on the town that Chaplin can get to his intended satire.

But is Chaplin close enough to life as it was lived in New York in the 1950s to satirise it effectively? We might pair this film with another late movie, EYES WIDE SHUT, as New York movies made by shut-in ex-pat geniuses which come from a place of inexperience.

The second unit obligingly provide Chaplin with some skyscraper shots, not the first ever Dutch tilts in a CC movie, but maybe the first handheld angle.

Shadhov finds the streets noisy — sirens and deafening music (“When I think of a million dollars / Tears come to my eyes”) broadcast from buildings (?) so he and his Ambassador (Oliver Johnston — plucked from obscurity by Chaplin and cast again in COUNTESS) decide to check out a movie.

Did New York movie houses still have live prologues in 1957? It’s possible they did, because the city had a vision of itself as exceptionally metropolitan to maintain. But did they feature bands — drummer, large horn section, pianist-singer — performing songs about rock ‘n’ roll in a big band style? I mean, anything’s possible, and this isn’t crazier than THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, in which rock ‘n’ roll stars perform in swank nightclubs. It seems weird, though. “Do you think this sort of thing is healthy?” ponders the King.

“I got shoes / I got shoes / Shoes to step on all your blues / When you do that rock ‘n’ roll tonight.”

My first laugh (9.07 mins in) comes when Shadhov, advancing down the aisle to a seat, steps over a swooned teenybopper. I think it’s the throwaway nature of the glimpsed sleeper that elevates it. Chaplin being who he is, he makes sure to serve up a reverse angle displaying further prone revellers, one of whom revives in time to bite his ankle. Which is rather inexplicable. These kids today are wild, seems to be the idea.

The movie’s about to start! TO BE CONTINUED

Big Bertha

The trenches of Woodland Hills.

Chaplin opens with a surprising tracking shot — a pre-Kubrickian vision of WWI. Lewis Milestone and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT might be the influence. Dissolves link different bits of tracking shot, as if Chaplin wouldn’t quite get the oner he was after, or as if he wanted to make this a series of glimpses implying a much bigger conflict.

The hills in the background are recognizable as the view from the back of my friend Randy Cook’s house in Woodland Hills.

As in MODERN TIMES, we have two cinematographers, but this time it’s Rollie Totheroh (as usual) and Karl Struss — as contrasting a pair of Hollywood artists as youcould choose. Struss had shot things like Griffith’s ABRAHAM LINCOLN and Mamoulian’s DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE. It’s tempting to associate him with the mobile camera and any mood lighting, and Totheroh with more straightforward head-to-toe prosccenium framing.

David Robinson’s Chaplin confirms this — Chaplin was for unknown reasons growing dissatisfied with Totheroh’s work — perhaps an obscure feeling that it was old-fashioned, which was true. But Struss “wasn’t giving him enough light. He was getting in tree branches and things to achieve ‘mood’. It might have been ‘mood’, but it wasn’t what Chaplin wanted,” AD Dan James is quoted as saying.

It’s a real problem — the most important quality for photography in a visual comedy is CLARITY — the figures need to READ. Everything central to the gag needs to be absolutely clear. The slightest ambiguity squashes the laugh. There are no effective slapstick noirs, no slapsticks with impressionistic visuals, and quite possibly what doomed Spielberg’s 1941 is the very attractive, diffuse, backlit cinematography and the Louma crane movement.

Big Bertha — the first character we meet with a name. The Jewish Barber remains anonymous. There was a real BB howitzer in WWI, the 42 cm kurze Marinekanone 14 L/12, but it was much shorter and less dramatic than the one constructed by J. Russell Spencer and Chaplin’s art department. (A shame Charles D. Hall had just stopped his collaboration with Chaplin — their first film together was SHOULDER ARMS and it would have been nice symmetry if this were the last. There’s one account from the set of ALL QUIET — which CDH also designed — suggesting that the designer served in WWI, but no family tradition confirms this).

VO! Who is this narrator? The IMDb is silent on the matter. His voice is deeper than Chaplin’s, but has similar clipped diction. Could CC be lowering his timbre, or just drilling someone else to deliver the lines as he would?

Horribly, Bertha’s target is Notre Dame, which would survive the war, and then survive the next war (IS PARIS BURNING? showcases the cathedral standing proud at the end) and then get gutted by fire due to human error, bad luck, poor contingency planning.

But, with Charlie the Jewish Barber pulling the trigger, Bertha merely explodes a nearby outhouse. The film’s first visual joke is a very Burt Reynolds type gag.

I was thinking I’d cover the whole WWI sequence in this post, but NO — we need to stop and ask WHO IS THE JEWISH BARBER? In what ways is he or is he not the Tramp/The Little Fellow/Mr. Wow-Wow?

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