A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Directed by Charles Chaplin

Film Review

A Countess from Hong Kong is the film that should never have been made - the far from glorious closing chapter in one of the most glorious of screen careers.  It's fairly widely acknowledged that this was Charlie Chaplin's worst film, his first foray into colour and widescreen, offering audiences the enticing prospect of Marlon Brando starring alongside Sophie Loren.  Had it been made a few years earlier, when Chaplin was more in command of his artistic faculties and better able to distinguish gem from paste, A Countess from Hong Kong might have been a commendable swansong, not the disappointing and costly turkey it ended up as.

Chaplin began work on the film almost immediately after he had published his now celebrated memoirs, aged 77.  He had originally conceived it in the 1930s, then titled Stowaway, as a vehicle for Paulette Goddard, who featured in two of his best films: Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940).  Thirty years on, tastes had changed but Chaplin stuck with his somewhat decrepit idea of romantic comedy, relying too much perhaps on Brando and Loren to bring it a modern dimension.  Chaplin himself appears in the film only briefly, in two cameo appearances as the ship's white-haired steward.  The only other film in which he did not have a leading role was his earlier A Woman of Paris (1923), which had also been a substantial commercial failure.

A Countess from Hong Kong looks glossy but it is unbearably staid and vacuous.  The Brando-Loren pairing has none of the magic that Chaplin and gambled on, and Brando looks frankly ill-at-ease playing comedy, leaving Loren to carry the film by herself, with mixed results.  Tippi Hedren turns up far too late in the film to inject some life into it, and a brief scene with Margaret Rutherford is unaccountably weird.  Overlong and preposterously stagy, the film quickly outstays its welcome and Chaplin's stale concoction of out-dated sentimentality and forced humour makes sitting through the entire film something of an endurance test.  It's a sad, pathetic end to a career that brought so much joy to every corner of the world.

Film Synopsis

Ogden Mears is a wealthy American diplomat who is soon to be made ambassador to Saudi Arabia.  During a stopover in Hong Kong, he meets Natasha, a Russian countess who scrapes a dubious living as a dancer and prostitute.  Tired of her life in the East, Natasha stows away aboard an ocean liner bound for the United States, hiding in Ogden's quarters.  The diplomat, wary against causing a scandal that might jeopardise his personal ambitions, is understandably nonplussed by this turn of events and insists that the countess return from whence she came.  Natasha eventually wins him round and he concocts a plan to get her off the ship by getting her to marry his valet, Hudson.  All is well until Ogden's estranged wife shows up and threatens the scheme...