Down for the countess

I had never felt sorry for Marlon Brando until I saw A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Charles Chaplin's last feature as director. Perhaps only a great artist could make a film this bad, but as I think about filmmakers such as Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and even Welles, none of them ever made something as incoherent and incompetent as this. (Although in fairness, Huston, Stevens and Kubrick did.)

Brando got a lot of heat at the time for being the "wrong" kind of actor for the film, of not having the right comic sensibilities. This is unfair. Chaplin was the wrong kind of director. Branod appears on-screen as a complete professional, game as hell, trying to play a decent sort of fellow who often acts in inconsistent, cruel and irrational ways and then has to suddenly reclaim his decency, who is asked to bend his character out of shape for an unmotivated gag and then try and revert to the character. In short, his assignment was impossible to begin with, and Jacques Tati, Peter Sellers, Roberto Begnini and Jack Lemmon combined couldn't have gotten this terribly conceived and horribly written part to make sense.

Loren survives clearly by ignoring Chaplin's simplistic direction and sparkling as much as she is allowed to. Every once in a while she, too, has been required to execute an out-of-context pantomime turn and she gets up and performs like a properly brought-up schoolgirl, and then goes back to what she knows works. And at one point, she actually gets to say, "This whole thing is a terrible mess," and you have to remind yourself she's talking about the character's situation, not the movie.

But the incompetence pervades the entire film. The set is lit flatly in all scenes, and it is the kind of movie in which people lie down and close their eyes to go to sleep without turning off any of the 32 lights that are blazing away on the set. The following things are meant to be hysterically funny: a door buzzer that sounds like an electronic fart (there are no door buzzers on cruise ships); burping; a giant bra--not a sexy one, but one clearly intended for an obese Amazon; running between one room and another; and an immense cruise ship which visibly rocks back and forth in bad weather, like the scow in The Immigrant (1916). Brando's character insists that Loren's character (a stowaway in an ambassador's stateroom) behave and dress decently, then gets mad when she is wearing his last clean pair of pajamas and tries to tear them off her body. His character seems to be going through some sort of personality disintegration attributable to a serious mental disorder, but it is just bad writing.

Oh well, you say, a door-slamming verbal farce was not Chaplin's form. Au contraire--take a look at The Idle Class or even City Lights, which are riddled with farce. No, Chaplin's gifts had waned so badly, that his own cameo in the film is not even funny. Chaplin acting a quick comic bit.

I'm sure people entered this feeling it would be an honor to work with a master and that the film, even if not one of Chaplin's masterpieces, would not be forgotten because he made it. Would that it were forgotten--everyone involved would have been better off. Poor Marlon.

[Out of respect for Chaplin, I will embed The Immigrant here, so you can see one of his best films, operating as actor and director at the height of his powers.]

Forever young

He's still got it. Showed James Dean's astonishing first lead performance in East of Eden (1955) in the Film Studies class and Dean still exerts his power, especially among a group of young people, still wrestling with the issues that deviled Dean's characters. I have no doubt that should he be reincarnated this year, still age 24, he would be a star all over. His acting, though it represents a certain generation of the Strasberg Method is so personally applied that he never really had imitators. Some dismiss him as a Brando imitator himself, but Brando still fit the mold of the cool professional actor, delving deeper than his predecessors and with an astonishingly invisible technique. Dean is an actor, too, but he appears to have been caught on camera by accident--ready to run and hide at any moment, filled with quirks and sudden apparently involuntary movements. Instead of displaying pride of craft, Dean seems embarrassed to be put on show and eager to run from the limelight. Except when his characters are attention-seeking.

This is the first time I really paid attention to the conclusion of the film, which is sheer perfection. The father is on his deathbed, the "good son" run away, the "bad son" not knowing what he should do. The cliche would have been the tearful reconciliation, followed by the father's hand losing its grip as his head turns away, the music swelling to indicate his death. But that death is not arrived at in the sequence. The father has had a paralyzing stroke, and he finally asks the son, Cal, to do something for him--to dismiss the obnoxious professional nurse and take care of the father himself. At that moment, the father permits the boy to become a man, and, at a single stroke (no pun intended), healing begins. This would be an invitation for overacting, but Julie Harris, Raymond Massey and James Dean all underplay, almost for the first time in the film and it is superb.