Blog - Friday, January 9, 2009 21:55 - 1 Comment

The Unknown Masterpiece

 

By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

If you want to watch the last movie Charlie Chaplin directed, A Countess from Hong Kong, his only film in color and his only work in widescreen, you won’t find it in the exhaustive white-cover sets MK2 put out. It doesn’t make its way into revivals or retrospectives either. In fact, the most recent Region 1 DVD release of the film finds it anonymously included in a Marlon Brando boxed set, sharing a disc with The Appaloosa. Which is tragic, because A Countess from Hong Kong is a masterpiece, one of the most beautifully edited films, a singular, frank and uncompromising movie.

The film, though Chaplin’s only non-self-financed feature, is entirely his own, never framing or cutting like anyone before or since. It’s a rebuke of the school of thought that says that editing “assembles” a film, a work where the idea of every shot and sound trumps ideas about “professionalism” and continuity. It’s Hollywood without the sheen, which is not the same as being without polish or expertise. It’s a little under two hours of tumbling moods, from masochistic romance to mechanized slapstick, from taciturn desperation to some of the most intelligent satire ever filmed. No sound, no color feels unnecessary. Someone might complain that the sets are stagy, but the complainers are just descendants of the people that wrote that Monsieur Verdoux’s France didn’t have enough period detail or art direction. The human voice takes on a rhythmic quality here, with dialogue measured out like eye drops, interspersing with bits of music that shift volume and location based on tone. You get the sense that Chaplin wrote the script while sitting at his grand piano, maybe with the metronome clicking away.

A Countess from Hong Kong begins where Lola Montes ends. An American sailor enters a seedy Hong Kong dance hall where 50 cents will get you a waltz with fallen royalty. With the exception of this early lurch towards the entrance of the dance hall and a glacial glide near the end, the camera in Countess moves on tiptoes, gently panning and tugging, as if Chaplin is careful not to wake a sleeping world. Chaplin’s music, all lullaby waltzes, makes every wood-paneled suite resemble a child’s room. Sophia Loren works here, a titled Russian countess born in exile in Shanghai and now earning a living peddling her aristocracy to American tourists. On a luxury ocean liner docked in the harbor, Marlon Brando broods. He’s the son of a wealthy family, looking to get into politics and secure a divorce from his wife. An elderly friend of his father takes Brando and his best friend (Chaplin’s son, Sydney, in a proto-Christopher Walken stammer) on the town with a trio of fallen aristocrats as escorts, Loren among them. He wakes up hung over the next morning, discovering that the ship has set sail and that Loren has stowed away in his cabin, hoping to escape from Hong Kong to America. There’s a bit of blackmail involved here as well: Brando doesn’t want Loren around, but if she gets caught it won’t look too good for his political career or his divorce. His wife, who doesn’t make an appearance until the last half-hour of the movie, is Tippi Hedren, doing a variation on Marnie. Eventually they all find their way to a rear-projected Hawaii, Brando having developed a sort of self-destructive love for Loren, which originally leads him to hide and rebuke her but finally to abandon his new post as ambassador to Saudi Arabia so he can go and dance with her under the end credits, subtly passionate in a room full of joyless couples. These aren’t the dances they did at the dance-halls the Tramp would find hide from the cops in, but rigidly-formulated excuses to make small talk, treated by the director with as much contempt as the abysmal rock group in A King in New York. It’s the sort of screwball comedy Michelangelo Antonioni could direct. Except, of course, for the happy ending: they can’t escape the world, but they can find love.

Science reassures; art upsets. Maybe that’s why people find comfort retreating into experimental films–because the answer to every successful experiment is a reassuring “Yes, this too is cinema.” Whereas someone watching a movie like A Countess from Hong Kong finds themselves asking, doubting, “Is this cinema?” When A Countess from Hong Kong was released, no one treated it seriously and almost no one defended it. It was “old-fashioned” and “sloppy,” and that’s remained the party line on it for critics ever since. But it’s been four decades. A lot of what seemed intelligent at the time now seems overly simplistic and a lot of what seemed naive has revealed its depth. Here’s a brave film, a complicated film, a masterpiece under our noses. Let’s hope some brave programmer one day gets the bright idea to revive it–and that we’ll be brave enough to appreciate it.