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USA 1957
Directed by
Charles Chaplin
101 minutes
Rated G

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

King In New York, A

Chaplin's penultimate film (he would make A Countess From Hong Kong ten years later) was the 68-year-old director's satirical response to the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era which had effectively forced him into exile in England.

Despite some amusing moments, most of them sight gags rather than verbal wit, overall the film is, like Chaplin's performance, stiff and mannered, and too given to moralizing to be effective. Set in America, but shot on a sound stage at Shepparton Studios in the UK, Chaplin casts himself in regal mode in order to ridicule the vulgarity of America, done quite effectively in an early sequence at a swank New York dinner party where he meets a go-getting television producer (Dawn Addams). So far so good but then the plot moves on to Chaplin's principal target when the King visits a progressive children's school and meets Rupert Macabee (Michael Chaplin, the director's11-year-old son), whose parents are about to be jailed as for not naming names to the HUAC. Matters thereafter bog down in axe-grinding set-ups which at best elicit sympathy but little enjoyment, the film petering out as Chaplin/The King leaves America for places unknown.

FYI: The film wasn't commercially screened in the U.S. until 1973.

 

 

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