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

Dyspeptic in Elsinore

Asides from my making-of Caesar and Cleopatra book, I also have a lovely, if tattered volume entitled The film HAMLET, covering Olivier’s 1948 production. Various heads of department contribute short chapters about their work.

My late friend Lawrie Knight was only a 3rd AD on it, and only for a few days. His story doesn’t feature. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Olivier, it seems, wanted the sound of a heartbeat to accompany the ghost’s appearance. In the end he used a drumbeat, but perhaps the story of Ruben Mamoulian recording his own heart after running up and down a flight of stairs, for the transformation scene in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, was already well-known? Olivier, saving himself the strain, sent an assistant off to run around the studio, and then they pressed a mic to his ribcage.

“Nothing but indigestion!” reported Lawrie, with a chortle.

The book lacks that kind of engrossing detail. Olivier’s own piece is rather windy, and devotes a lot of time to justifying his choice to shoot in black and white, though he would later admit that he was having “a frightful row with Technicolor” which played a significant part in the decision. Still, it was a great choice.

Really lovely pic of Larry directing in costume and, it seems, in character.

Producer Anthony Bushell’s thoughts on the casting are more interesting. He starts by recounting an anecdote from his youth as an actor: he tried to secure a walk-on/spear-carrying role in John Barrymore’s London production of the play. Barrymore somehow misunderstood and thought he was angling for Laertes.

“Young man, it is your misfortune that the Hamlet in this production will never see fifty again. You cannot possibly play Laertes with me.”

(Barrymore wasn’t actually fifty yet, but maybe he felt it, or maybe he actually said forty.)

We learn that Stanley Holloway got the role of the gravedigger after “F.J. McCormick, the little Irishman who as the bowler-hatted Shell in ‘Odd Man Out’ enchanted thousands only to sadden them by his untimely death, was first to have played the role.’

I like what Bushell says about Osric.

Cleoplatters

My late friend Lawrie Knight’s stories usually check out.

His first film job was on CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, an epic mess. “We shipped sand to Egypt!” he said, full of wonderment. “During wartime!”

Lawrie was shipped there too, manning a radio from a tent to try to coordinate the battle scenes. “We killed so many people!” he chortled. Years later, he met a man in a London street who greeted him as an old friend, revealed a missing ear, and asked “When are we going to make another film? I’ve still got one ear!”

Lawrie claimed, as I recall, that the local extras ate the sandals they were issued with to play Roman or Egyptian soldiers. Soft leather was indeed eaten on long sea voyages when the food ran out, so it can be done. But Marjorie Deans’ lovely making-of book, Meeting at the Sphinx, has a different version: according to her, the soldiers’ shields were made from papier mache, and it was these that ended up being devoured, three hundred of them. A more substantial meal for each poorly-paid extra. Tasty, too: Dean supplies the detail that the shields were varnished with a kind of fish-paste which made them mouth-wateringly delicious.

Deans’ story has more convincing detail, and was told nearer the time…

It’s possible that both stories are true, and only natural modesty prevented the background artists from consuming their entire wardrobe, denuding themselves. It’s not certain that Deans was on location, but she may have been closer to the action than Lawrie, in his tent, so her story may be more accurate. Or Lawrie may have muddled the story a bit in the ensuing decades. Or I may be misquoting him — maybe his story was about the shields, and he said something else about sandals in another context. It was a while ago.

At any rate, I feel that we can be sure that somebody ate something they shouldn’t have on the location shoot for this film.