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March 25 (London): a KING IN NEW YORK. Even on a Steenbeck, Chaplin's penultimate feature and last extended performance has such a naked power of embarrassment and assault that one can see right away why so many have recoiled from it. Chaplin himself avoids any mention of it in the text of his Autobiography; most reports refer to it as a shameful debacle; and even such an indefatigable enthusiast as Bazin virtually threw in the towel. So far as I can gather, only Rossellini - seconded by some of his wilder Cahiers disciples - had the perspicacity in 1957 to call it the film of a free man. Clearly the objections can't be traced back to any failures of expression: how many films are more expressive than Chaplin's? No, the discomfort seems to be with the things that are expressed, more autobiographical and candid in their revelations than anything we are ordinarily accustomed to; and without this "personal" reading, the film is almost meaningless.
In other words, Chaplin's letter of spite and sorrow to America asserts personal indignation - perhaps the least palatable form to an audience, because it is the most honest, consequently the most apt. In place of generalized invective, we largely get Chaplin's own experience, which includes his complex and ambivalent implication in the American dream: the King's own silliness in the presence of Dawn Addams. But the horrible taste of the plastic surgery episodes, which immediately derive from this, is not only Chaplin's transgression, but America's too; and the charge that most of the film isn't very funny should be met with the reply that, as at the end of the great dictator and throughout much of monsieur verdoux, there are times when laughter is beside the point. The implication of Chaplin being hounded out of America was that he didn't deserve to stay; the implication of a king in new york (made four years later) is that America didn't deserve Chaplin. And maybe it didn't. How could McCarthy-crazed America have possibly appreciated the lucidity that the film has to offer, which, going beyond Tashlin, reveals the true moral and aesthetic tackiness of the U.S. in the mid-Fifties, without any digestible sweetening? That America in the midFifties had more than this...