Throughline

Carol Reed advised that one should avoid shooting master shots with kids and adults together. The adults get thrown off by their anxiety that the kids will forget their lines. “In fact,” he added, “children never forget their lines. But they do forget their cues.”

In order to remember their cues, kids memorize entire scenes, not just their own lines and cues, and so you can see little Emma Watson’s lips moving as the other characters speak in the final train station scene of HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE. She’s psychically looping the late Robbie Coltraine’s dialogue.

And so too with little Michael Chaplin in A KING IN NEW YORK — I missed this, but once you see it you can’t unsee it. Actor Steven McNicoll, a fan of the film, tested me this valuable information. He queries why Chaplin, rarely reluctant to cut to himself, didn’t go to a single whenever his son started lip-synching. I assume either he didn’t notice or didn’t think anyone else would.

It makes a joke out of Chaplin’s advice to older son Sydney to not just stand around waiting for his line, but to pay close attention to the other players. Practice what you preach, Charlie!

Stevie added a suggestion that I check out Remembering Charlie by Jerry Epstein, Chaplin’s producer. It’s a treasure trove. And now I understand Bertrand Tavernier’s enthusiasm for my budget top sheet, which included Epstein’s name — he immediately clocked him as having been involved in some of Eddie Constantine’s French comedy-thrillers.

The book gives us the memorable image of Constantine singing Ol’ Man River to an appreciative Chaplin.

Epstein directed this Constantine movie, without credit, and apparently used some gags suggested by Chaplin. Now I want to see it to find out if they’re recognizably Chaplinesque.

We also learn that the character of Ann Kay was written for Kay Kendall, who was dating young Sydney for a time, but then Chaplin saw GENEVIEVE and didn’t care for it, and also realised he needed an American girl. Kay Kendall would have gotten laughs, which the film needs, but he was right — the only thing maintaining a sense that we’re in New York is the intermittent American and pseudo-American accents.

And it turns out that the very funny/grotesque plastic surgery sequence in KING was inspired by Epstein’s attempted nose-job. Constantine, convinced that Epstein would make a great co-star if only he’d have his schnozz fixed, had persuaded the non-actor to sign up for racial reassignment rhinoplasty, but he’d thankfully chickened out at the last moment. Chaplin saw the comic potential and ran with it.

The book informs us that Sam Wanamaker was originally cast in the Sid James part, but Chaplin felt he wasn’t aggressive enough and replaced him. But nobody told Sam, who turned up to the premiere with his family… He’d been very excited to work with CC, especially in a film denouncing the blacklist. Still, he DID get to work with CC, nobody can take that away from him.

Epstein gives us valuable insights into Chaplin’s writing process, though he tends to praise the film for things that arguably don’t deserve praise. Chaplin began with a few scenes, added more disconnected bits, searched for a unifying theme, and then finally hit on the idea of bringing back Michael’s blacklist orphan (Rosenberg son?), who runs away from the orphanage into some freezing back projection before turning up, rather inexplicably, at King Shadhov’s hotel.

The trouble with this idea is that it can’t unify all Chaplin’s ideas — Michael doesn’t even appear until halfway, then disappears for a great stretch with no clue he’s to return. The disparate scenes remain fragmented, the movie’s momentum collapsing in a series of fits, starts, and non-starters. Chaplin could write MODERN TIMES as a bag of bits, since the unifying theme was inherently present in the background of every instant of the movie — How do you survive in the modern world? THE GREAT DICTATOR and MONSIEUR VERDOUX both have serious dramatic business boiling away at all times, in which the protagonists are inextricably tangled. LIMELIGHT is less assured, because it chooses multiple problems in place of one good big one — Suicide! Hysterical Paaralyssi! Alcoholism! Creative Crisis! May-September Romance! A Woman in Love with Two Men!

Epstein wonders why people insist on seeing KING as anti-American. Nobody seems to have consciously intended this. But the movie attained this tract status by increments, so nobody noticed. Chaplin has some fun poking at American culture, innocently enough. Then he grafts on the blacklist. Now all the light satire comes to seem heavier, part of an overall attack. Still, the film is to be praised for directly attacking HUAC when everyone else was afraid to, and if it IS a critique of America it comes from a warm place — Chaplin wants America to live up to its best ideals, which is surely the opposite of being anti-American or indeed unamerican.

As in A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG, a character is dressed in the lead character’s outsized pajamas, turning them briefly into a Little Tramp figure (in COUNTESS it’s Loren in Brando’s yellow jimjams).

One successful aspect of Chaplin weaving his son through the storyline is he serves as punchline of sorts to King Shadhov’s attempt to pitch his unspecified atomic power plan to the Atomic Energy Commission — they turn up when Shadhov is out, get an earful of Michael’s communistic political speech, and run fleeing into the process shots of streets.

This leads — eventually — to Shadhov being subpoenaed, so now we’re into the film’s final stretch —

TO BE CONCLUDED

Shadhov Show

The trip to the movies is probably my favourite part of A KING IN NEW YORK. The parody of rock ‘n’ roll isn’t particularly accurate or acute — though the song is about shoes, apparently a major element of popular tunesmithing — see also “Shoe, shoe, shoe, baby,” broadcast into the afterlife in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH — but the swooning bobbysoxers are funny, as are the movie trailers, even though they look like bizarrely 1930s Warner Bros jobs (only in widescreen), not fifties ballyhoo.

I wish there were more trailers — they allow Chaplin to do, effectively, sketch comedy, a mode we haven’t sen him try before, and the pace peps the film up. We get a joke about sex changes/gender reassignment, then a big news story thanks to “the Danish girl” — Edward D. Wood’s GLEN OR GLENDA? appeared the same year, and then a parody of widescreen in which a western shoot-out forces the audience to turn their heads as if spectating a tennis match (or at least a movie tennis match, as in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN).

This stuff is faintly Tashlinesque, and Tashlin would have been a decent role model for Chaplin’s acidic attack on America. The guiding principles would be — (1) keep things moving, get one gag out of the way fast so you can bring on the next (2) fire in all directions (the motto of Fassbinder) (3) have a narrative throughline kept taut with tension that serves as a laundry line to hang the jokes on.

Well, outside of this brief bit, Chaplin doesn’t do any of that. The film doesn’t have a clear central reason to exist — yes, but what about a king in New York? — save for the anti-McCarthy stuff and the odd crack at American culture, which are shunted into the margins in favour of just watching this king try his hand at various things. He has a mission in America — to promote a revolutionary plan for nuclear power — but this depends on meeting the men from the Atomic Commission, who won’t meet him. So we have that dreaded thing, a passive protagonist, twiddling his thumbs…

Chaplin does his best to keep himself occupied, but a king staying at the Ritz does not face the immediate existential dilemmas of a tramp. The money King Shadhov has stolen (the movie tries to fudge this, but it seems he has stolen at least some of the nation’s wealth, before the crooked prime minister steals that from him) sets him up pleasantly, and then the blandishments of the advertisers who try to lure him into debasing himself are regularly rejected on the grounds of integrity, which makes it hard for us to believe in him as hard up, until suddenly they aren’t, which makes it hard for us to believe in his integrity…

Another general point: Chaplin revisited this film some years after making it, making fourteen short deletions. These don’t remove anything funny or important, but they do tend to wreck the flow. One scene ends with Shadhov asking where his overcoat is, and being told it’s in the outer office, but we never see him go there and fetch it, making the exchange more pointless than it already is. (Since THE GREAT DICTATOR, Chaplin has ceased to critique dialogue on the basis of necessity. He just lets them chatter.)

Sometimes we can guess why the cuts were made: outside the cinema (showing THE BABY AND THE BATTLESHIP, a British picture), every single extra seems to glance at the camera, a surprising gaffe. The assistant director on this is René Dupont, and I suggest we hold him to task for this — he’s apparently still alive at 96, and we share the same birthday apart from me not being 96 (yet).

It’s as if Chaplin’s tendency to look at the camera, establishing a rapport with his chums in the audience, which he’s now weaned himself off, has spread to the background artists. Or as if they shot this on location with real people and an insufficiently concealed camera.

Since Shadhov doesn’t have one big thing to do (as the Tramp always did), Chaplin diverts him with little tasks. Sometimes these show promise, and aren’t developed long enough. Ordering food in a restaurant where the loud band makes speech inaudible seems a good opportunity to remind us of our star’s mime skills, but the scene is brief and Oliver Johnston gets as much gesticulation as Chaplin.

At other times, the diversions are bafflingly pointless. The Queen shows up, played by Maxine Audley (blind woman from PEEPING TOM). Nothing of the slightest interest passes between the royals. There is no dramatic tension, not even unresolved sexual tension, and though divorce is discussed nobody has strong feelings about the subject one way of the other. This is a blast of dead air arriving mid-way through what I suppose we must call the first act, occupying five deadly minutes of screen time and stopping the film in its tracks like a blunderbuss to the head. I *guess* CC must have wanted some kind of Noel Coward air of sophistication with everybody behaving in a tebbly civilised way, but there’s no MEAT to be skirted around. There’s an elephant-shaped hole in the room. Nothing to be civilised about.

It’s almost a relief, then, when sex rears its particularly creepy head — King Shadhov (and his equally aged secretary) discover Dawn Addams bathing in the adjoining bathroom — and by “discover” I mean they enthusiastically peep at her. This inspires more pantomime — Shadhov disappointed miming that he can only see her head, then that the shower curtain’s in the way. On the one hand, a bit of farce-comedy energy is injected — on the other, it’s all very grubby and off-putting. Chaplin has been careful not to be lustful onscreen since his sex/divorce scandal in the twenties. The Tramp’s priapic imp side hasn’t had an outing since the mad scene in MODERN TIMES (alibied by insanity) and Hynkel’s extremely brisk wooing of a secretary. Verdoux is all business and Calvero is all muted romance. In a way, this new frankness could be refreshing, except that, despite all that tennis, Chaplin is not a particularly youthful-looking 68-year-old, and anyway, this is PEEPING.

(Movies used to assume peeping was something all males would indulge in, given the chance. It’s interesting to watch

Dawn Addams — who is extremely beautiful — is an interesting presence here. As a lure inserted into Shadhov’s luxury hotel in order to get him mixed up in something shady, she’s performing the same plot function she does in THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR MABUSE, where millionaire Peter Van Eyck discovers her on his window ledge at the Luxor. And the voyeurism seems to connect the two films too. Fritz Lang, of course, had not forgotten how to keep a plot motor running at all times.

Shortly after falling into Addams’ bathtub, Shadhov washes in his own, under the electronic eye of a TV screen oozing sexy commercials at him, with a built-in windscreen wiper for condensation a decent bit of satire which also recalls the lavatory CCTV in MODERN TIMES. A reminder that if Chaplin doesn’t want to do Tashlin, he might do Tati. But on the whole I’d prefer him to do Chaplin. But he won’t…

Wheeler Dealer

Starting LIMELIGHT with Calvero drunk, so that Chaplin can do his celebrated inebriate act, is an odd choice in a way, because LIMELIGHT is not a comedy. Like A WOMAN OF PARIS, his last serious film, it has comic elements, but it’s at heart a melodrama, and setting it up as such would seem to be its most important task.

But Claire Bloom is attempting suicide by overdose AND gassing, so that side of things is fairly well represented. The uncomfortable humour of her rescuer being pie-eyed is useful because it establishes that there WILL be some comedy, although in fact almost all the comedy we get will be stage performances. In their long philosophical conversations, Calvero and Thereza will mostly play it straight, and the supporting cast don’t get a lot of humour either. Thereza will laugh at Calvero’s funny business, but doesn’t attempt to make him laugh — her only humour comes when she’s with young Sydney Chaplin as the composer, which suggests to me that Calvero is right to see them as a better match than Thereza with himself.

Another family member enters the story — Wheeler Dryden, Chaplin’s less well-known half-brother (less well-known than the talented but horrifying Syd). I’ve seen WD in a silent short at Bologna and found him to be an appalling actor. He’s OK here. He has no real emotions, though, so it’s good that he’s playing a strictly professional medical man.

(To fairly assess Chaplin’s limitations as a writer and director of talking picture drama, one could contrast the scene of Thereza’s overdose with the similar sequence in THE APARTMENT, which is both delicate — Billy Wilder frames the sleeping pills as a reflection in the shaving mirror rather than show them directly — and raw — slapping and puking — mostly offscreen but inescapable — and his doctor is both professional AND passionately moral.)

Dryden was very effective as a radio voice-over in THE GREAT DICTATOR — again, a role without human emotion — but this is his first onscreen role for his half-brother. (WRONG — see comments) I can’t see him as the kind of performer Chaplin would have admired, were it not for the familial relationship. But, on the other hand, apart from his oft-stated commitment to emotional truth, Chaplin also required his players to be technicians who could mimic the way HE played out a scene. Claire Bloom, completely inexperienced as a film actor, was absolutely relieved to find that Chaplin intended to act her part himself, and all she had to do was copy him. This means any inadequacies we find in her perf can be laid squarely at Chaplin’s door.

Bloom liked his leading ladies young, and he liked them inexperienced — virginal, we might say. MONSIEUR VERDOUX was atypical in that Martha Raye was an experienced comic. But she wasn’t the romantic lead, the ingenue Marilyn Nash was, even though Raye has more of a sex relationship with Verdoux than “the Girl” does.

Chaplin had been becoming more and more careful about the amount of romance he allowed himself onscreen. In THE GOLD RUSH, the Little Fellow doesn’t achieve an actual romantic relationship until the final shot, and in CITY LIGHTS it’s all subterfuge and mistaken identity and in the final shot it’s not at all clear than the logical next step will be a romance. MODERN TIMES offers a fantasy and then a brief reality of domesticity with a very young girl, but it’s sexless — “insipid,” one female viewer just called it on Twitter. But would be comfortable with it being any more, ah, sipid, than it is?

THE GREAT DICTATOR has Hynkel showing brief lustful passions when he can be bothered, while the Jewish barber has none, his tentative love affair with Hannah seeming entirely chaste.

One thing about Calvero — he has a much deeper, throatier, more masculine voice than any previous Chaplin character with an audible voice. The Jewish barber is almost fluting in tone, his voice nervously up until he makes the big speech at the end and drops an octave or so, as he drops the disguise and becomes Chaplin. Hynkel is slightly deeper and so is Verdoux, but not by much. The light comedy Chaplin is going for seems to provoke from him lighter voices (TGD may not seem light, but there’s a Lubitchian comic-opera airiness to the playing, with throwaway line readings — “Far from perfect” — which contrasts thrillingly with the darkness of the subject.

Calvero, we could say, is Chaplin’s most butch character.

The most surprising gag in this sequence is when Calvero smells gas, and checks first his cheap cigar, then the sole of his shoe. A dogshit joke in a Chaplin film… this is a first, but it’s in keeping with the peeing baby gags from much earlier in his work. Chaplin is not averse to vulgarity if it can be achieved in a subtle way. It’s important here that Calvero has NOT stepped in anything offensive, so the joke is about his booze-fuddled misapprehension, not actual faecal matter.

Chaplinesque cheapness: when Calvero shoulders Thereza’s door in (told you he was butch), the entire wall bends inwards. Building a set with a wall that can remain rigid in such circumstances is no small thing, but of course it’s perfectly possible, and necessary when you have a script that demands it. And LIMELIGHT was filmed with fairly strict fidelity to the script.

Deduct a few marks from art director Eugene Lourie, a man with a substantial career as designer (RULES OF THE GAME) and a less distinguished one as director (GORGO and other giant monster pics).

There’s more cheapness in the view from Calvero’s second-floor window. Lourie built a miniature London cityscape rather than having a painted backdrop executed, which is not a bad idea in itself. But it matters how you do it. A big, distant model with some kind of diffusion is always going to look better than a tiny model right beside the window frame. And even though we’re told this was a model, it LOOKS completely painted and completely flat. Which is in keeping with the look of all CC’s post-Charles D. Hall designs. Costa Gavras can claim that in THE GREAT DICTATOR the cheap flat look suggests something about the pasteboard artifice of fascism, that argument is weakened when the same flimsiness prevails in a film about the pre-war music hall.

(But we can entertain ourselves by imagining Gorgo or Behemoth the Sea Monster or the Rhedosaurus from THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS rampaging across the skyline, as they would in subsequent Lourie joints.)

There is of course an unfortunate irony about Chaplin recreating London in his last American film, and then being forced to recreate New York in his first British one. But that’s fully explained by the vicissitudes of fate — Chaplin would never have considered filming in the UK if he hadn’t been barred from entering the US, and he’d never have felt the need to make A KING IN NEW YORK if not for his exile.

I don’t think LIMELIGHT is very well edited. It’s the only film Joe Inge cut, but I assume Chaplin was looking over his shoulder the whole time, if Mr. Inge was short enough to allow this. So there’s an extremely awkward fade to black in mid-action, designed to splink out Dryden’s emetic treatment of Thereza — the film is much more delicate than THE APARTMENT on this score, and probably had to be in 1952. But fading is a crazy choice. A dissolve would work, but Chaplin would need to have provided some kind of angle change, or else targeted the camera on a time-lapse device like a glass that’s full and then empty. Direct cutting did exist, but was still very much a novelty, and wouldn’t even acquire a name until the nouvelle vague popularized it, and Chaplin would never adopt it. So he’s lumbered himself with an awkward transition.

He’s also lumbered himself with unnecessary exposition — while Thereza might need to ask “Where am I?” since she’s been moved while unconscious, there ought to be a way to avoid having Calvero summarise everything we’ve only just seen. This is the kind of thing that marks Chaplin as an amateur when it comes to dialogue. And LIMELIGHT is his most dialogue-heavy film to date. Fortunately, some good news is on the way — Marjorie Bennett, comic maid from MONSIEUR VERDOUX, is on her way…