The Late Charlie Chaplin

Today is the first day of the best revival series we’ve seen in New York all year, “The Late Film,” at BAM, featuring works from the latter part of great directors’ careers. (It begins with Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” from 1970, which David Denby discusses in the current issue.) One late film that’s not included in the series is one of the greatest of all, “A King in New York,” from 1957; it’s the last film which he both directs and stars in (ten years later, he directed “A Countess from Hong Kong,” in which he has only a cameo role). “A King in New York” is a film of a rare comic fury; Chaplin had definitively twitted Hitler from afar in “The Great Dictator”; here, he twits the United States—not just its McCarthyist bigotry (which had, in effect, gotten him kicked out five years earlier) but the entire range of its cultural modernity, from television and advertising to Hollywood and rock and roll; as he pokes fun at the rising trend of cosmetic surgery, he also highlights his own advancing age and its indignities. It’s as great a film as Chaplin ever made; not only is it the equal of his better-known, earlier masterworks, but it is intimately personal and imbued with a lifetime of bitter wisdom as well as a mercurial, righteous anger. I discuss a clip from it, below.