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In the autumn of 1952, Charlie Chaplin was on a ship bound for London with his family, heading to the premiere of Limelight, when he learned that his permit to re-enter the United States had been revoked. He would not set foot again for many years in the country where he had lived for nearly forty years and made all his great films. We have already told the Swiss part of that exile story. In this post we want to look at the exile's most direct fruit on screen, the 1957 film A King in New York. It is a satire in which Chaplin looks at the country that shut him out from afar, with a mocking but wounded eye.
A View from Across the Ocean
Despite its title, A King in New York was not shot in New York. Since Chaplin could no longer enter America, the film was made in England, at Shepperton Studios. New York streets, nightclubs, television studios and a hearing room were rebuilt near London. This gives the film a curious air: everything looks a little too tidy, a little too representative. Yet perhaps that is fitting, because the America Chaplin portrays is less a real city than an idea; an America remembered, exaggerated and judged by someone looking from far away.
Chaplin was now far from his own Hollywood studio and the crew he had worked with for years. Budget and resources were more limited than in his American years. Even so, he once again wrote, directed, starred in and composed the music for the film.
A King in New York is the first film Chaplin made outside America. This gave him the chance, for the first time, to portray from entirely outside a society he had observed from within for years. The star system, newspaper headlines, the way fame is manufactured and consumed: these were subjects he knew very well. Now he could treat them with the ease of someone who no longer had anything to lose in that world.
A King Without a Throne
The hero of the story is King Shahdov, ruler of the small European kingdom of Estrovia. The film begins with Shahdov being toppled by a revolution and fleeing, barely escaping with his life, to New York. The fortune he hoped to bring with him has already been carried off by his prime minister. Shahdov has a grand plan in mind: to bring prosperity to the world by using atomic energy for peaceful purposes. But nobody in America is interested in his ideas; all they care about is whether a king can be a marketable celebrity.
Shahdov is a figure who resembles Chaplin in exile: respected but penniless, famous but misunderstood, well-meaning but out of step with the rhythm of the times. Chaplin does not hide the resemblance; on the contrary, he turns it into material for jokes. The gulf between the king's dignity and the noise around him is the main source of the film's comedy.
Laughter in the Age of Advertising
The most entertaining part of the film is the sequence in which Shahdov meets the American world of advertising and television. Ann Kay, a television specialist played by Dawn Addams, invites the king to a dinner party and, without his knowledge, broadcasts their conversation live through hidden cameras. Shahdov suddenly becomes the most talked-about face in the country and finds himself in a series of commercials. The man who once sat on a throne is now smiling into the camera for liquor and assorted products.
Chaplin's satire here is aimed not only at television but at a culture in which everything becomes a show. The king even agrees to cosmetic surgery to look younger; but his face is stretched so tight that he cannot laugh. When he cannot help laughing at a comic act in a nightclub, his stitches burst. In a movie theater he is bewildered by ear-splitting music and the wide screen. In these scenes the master of silent cinema looks at the cacophony of sound and image through the baffled eyes of an older man. That gaze remains surprisingly relevant today, when advertising and screens surround our lives far more than they did then.
Little Rupert and the Committee
The film's tone changes with the arrival of Rupert Macabee, played by Chaplin's son Michael Chaplin. Rupert is a boy the king meets on a visit to a school, a child who talks beyond his years and thinks hard about politics. His parents are under investigation for being communists. Lecturing the king on politics at the school, Rupert becomes both the funniest and the saddest character in the film.
Because of his connection with the boy, Shahdov himself comes under suspicion and is called before a congressional committee. The scene is an open parody of the McCarthy-era investigations into "un-American activities." Here Chaplin returns to his favorite weapon, physical comedy: with a fire hose stuck on his finger, he drenches the members of the committee. The laughter is big, but the anger behind it is not concealed.
The real blow comes at the end. To save his parents, Rupert gives in to pressure and agrees to name names. The boy who once made fiery speeches stands before us broken and silent. Chaplin conveys the darkest side of the McCarthy era, the climate of fear that pushed people to inform on one another, through a child's face. It is the harshest and most unforgettable moment of the film.
Between Anger and Jest
A King in New York is not a flawless film. Some critics say Chaplin's resentment occasionally gets ahead of the satire, and that some scenes are too direct and preachy. The artificiality of a studio-built New York also stands out. But these flaws cannot be separated from the film's sincerity. Here Chaplin is at once a comedian trying to make us laugh and a man who feels he has been wronged, and he does not try to keep those two roles apart.
Even so, the film's greatest strength is that it ties its anger to a child's story. Chaplin's decision to give the role to his own son is meaningful in itself: a boy living through his father's exile at close hand plays another family being tested by the same fear. The relationship between Rupert and Shahdov is not that of a king and a child but a friendship between two outsiders. Both are punished for speaking their minds, and neither can find a place for himself in this country.
At the end of the film Shahdov decides to leave America and says he hopes this madness will pass. That optimism is almost a promise an exile makes to himself: one day things will calm down, one day it will be possible to return.
A Belated Homecoming
The film was shown in 1957 in Britain and other European countries, but for a long time it was not released in the United States. American audiences could only see A King in New York in 1973. The timing was no coincidence: a year earlier, in 1972, Chaplin had returned to America for the first time in twenty years to receive an honorary Oscar and had been given a standing ovation. A film regarded as a forbidden satire during the harshest years of the Cold War thus reached the very country it was about only after its author's reputation had been restored.
Watching A King in New York today means seeing Chaplin perhaps more personally than ever. There is neither the Tramp's innocence nor Verdoux's cold intelligence here. There is only an artist far from home, growing old, who still believes that making people laugh is a way of answering back.
