retro movie review: A Countess From Hong Kong
A Countess From Hong Kong is a movie made by people who didn't know what they were doing. And by that, I'm not referring to general incompetence (this review will make the filmmakers sound incompetent, but considering their stellar work before and after this movie, that would be a hard case to make) but I am saying that people making this film didn't seem to understand what genre they were working in.
Before I get into exactly how this movie missteps, let me provide a quick overview: Marlon Brando -- not the old, mumbling Brando, but the young, sex-symbol Brando -- stars as Ogden Mears, a rising star in the United States Foreign Service. Ogden's combination of youth and prestige within the foreign service makes him an international media sensation, and as the movie opens, there is talk of him being appointed Secretary of State, although he quickly learns that that lofty position has instead been given to a rival, and Ogden is instead given the consolation appointment as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Ogden sets out on a cruise ship from Hong Kong (where he has been vacationing) to the U.S., to formally accept his new position. However, his first morning at sea brings shock when he wakes up next to Natascha (Sophia Loren), a Russian countess and expatriate he has no memory of, thanks to a wild party the night before. Natascha is a stow-away, determined to make the trip to America, and although Ogden's initial impulse is to report her to the captain, his hands are tied, as he is a married man with a career and possible scandal to think about, while she is a beautiful, scantily clad woman who stowed away in the young diplomat's room.
Natascha and Ogden scheme to keep Natascha hidden in his room, but this proves complicated, as various members of his staff, the press, and the ship's crew keep finding reasons to enter Ogden's suite at the most inopportune times. The result is a lot of confusion, deception, improvised excuses, quick costume changes, and people ducking behind furniture and slamming doors, as everything gets further complicated by the fact that characters seem to fall in and out of love and lust at the drop of a hat.
What we have here is a fairly standard bedroom farce, and all of the material needed to make it a good bedroom farce is clearly present on the screenplay level. I wish that was enough to make it a good movie, but to praise this film because of its screenplay is like praising a condemned building because its blueprints were drawn well -- all of the potential for a well-constructed product may be there, but the result is still a wreck.
I took notes while watching this movie -- already a bad sign, since it means I wasn't too busy sitting back and enjoying what was playing out on the screen. The first note I made concerned the pacing. This is a story and a script which doesn't just require, but desperately cries out for madcap slapstick and rapid-fire delivery. Comedy often requires a fast pace, and farce demands it outright. Yet with A Countess From Hong Kong, every actor speaks with patient deliberation, and every shot lingers for a few beats too long -- just long enough to kill the comic potential in every scene.
Speaking of actors, this cast simply has no winners (with one very small exception I'll get to in a minute). The performances aren't bad as far as acting goes, so much as they are simply inappropriate for the genre; everybody in the whole movie makes the same mistake, delivering their lines with quiet earnestness when the dialogue so very clearly requires desperation and confusion. Marlon Brando is particularly miscast, providing an all-too serious interpretation of what should have been a funny character.
This is the movie that has finally convinced me that my friend Laurie is right about comedy necessarily stemming from frustration rather than anger. (Laurie insists that she got this theory from Norman Lear, but when I asked Norman Lear, he says he got the theory from Laurie.) Brando plays many of his scenes in this movie not with increasing frustration, which could have been hilarious, but rather with an undercurrent of intense, near-to-boiling-over fury. This was a trademark acting style for Brando, and in drama, it works wonders. In comedy, it completely destroys any attempt at light-heartedness. There is a scene, for example, in which Ogden finds Natascha wearing his pajamas without his permission, and he demands that she remove them immediately or he will take them off for her. The attempted humor to the scene -- the writer's intention is so clear, that it's a shame it doesn't play out as planned -- is that Ogden's frustration level is so through the roof that he doesn't realize the inevitable, sexual implications behind his demand that Natascha immediately remove her clothing. It occurs to Natscha, though, whose teasing comments go right over Ogden's head as he chases her about the room in an attempt to rip the clothing from her.
Had Brando played this scene with comical frustration, the result would have been a delightful mixture of eroticism and slapstick. But with Brando's barely contained rage, Ogden' doesn't come off as an oblivious innocent, but as a disturbed, possibly dangerous man. The extent to which Brando's choice is so wrong for this scene is exacerbated by the fact that Sophia Loren seems to understand the intent behind the humor, and has fun with it. The result is a really odd mismatch of stylistic interpretations of the same scene; on the one hand, you have Loren gaily laughing and cavorting about the room, and then you have Brando, who looks like he's going to tear her head off if he ever catches her.
I understand that Brando did a good job in the farce Guys and Dolls, but in A Countess From Hong Kong, he is simply dead wrong as the comic leading man. Plug Sid Caesar or Dick van Dyke into this role, and you probably would have had something. But Brando? What comically-challenged idiot thought to cast Marlon Brando as the leading man in what should have been a wacky comedy?
The answer to that question is what's weird about this movie failing so completely, because it was directed, produced, and written by none other than Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest comedy minds of his or any other generation. It's hard, even mind-blowing, to reconcile Chaplin's genius with his complete bungling of this movie. And yet Chaplin is responsible not only for the miscasting of Brando in the lead role -- a terrible choice that is hard to fathom -- but also for the incompetently drawn-out pace that kills so much of -- in fact, all of -- whatever comic potential remains.
I earlier mentioned that there was one small exception in this cast, and that is Chaplin himself, who has two very brief scenes as a porter. An old man at this point in his career, Chaplin gave himself very, very little to do in his scenes, which amount to nothing more than an unimportant cameo. But if you watch the movie, note how his energy and positivity give each scene a small boost. It's not nearly enough to make up for everything else that goes wrong in every scene, but it's a small something. It proves that, at least on a performer's level, Chaplin understood what was needed for the movie. That's precisely what makes such a mystery out of his complete failure to turn this potentially fun farce into anything other than a dull disappointment.
Before I get into exactly how this movie missteps, let me provide a quick overview: Marlon Brando -- not the old, mumbling Brando, but the young, sex-symbol Brando -- stars as Ogden Mears, a rising star in the United States Foreign Service. Ogden's combination of youth and prestige within the foreign service makes him an international media sensation, and as the movie opens, there is talk of him being appointed Secretary of State, although he quickly learns that that lofty position has instead been given to a rival, and Ogden is instead given the consolation appointment as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Ogden sets out on a cruise ship from Hong Kong (where he has been vacationing) to the U.S., to formally accept his new position. However, his first morning at sea brings shock when he wakes up next to Natascha (Sophia Loren), a Russian countess and expatriate he has no memory of, thanks to a wild party the night before. Natascha is a stow-away, determined to make the trip to America, and although Ogden's initial impulse is to report her to the captain, his hands are tied, as he is a married man with a career and possible scandal to think about, while she is a beautiful, scantily clad woman who stowed away in the young diplomat's room.
Natascha and Ogden scheme to keep Natascha hidden in his room, but this proves complicated, as various members of his staff, the press, and the ship's crew keep finding reasons to enter Ogden's suite at the most inopportune times. The result is a lot of confusion, deception, improvised excuses, quick costume changes, and people ducking behind furniture and slamming doors, as everything gets further complicated by the fact that characters seem to fall in and out of love and lust at the drop of a hat.
What we have here is a fairly standard bedroom farce, and all of the material needed to make it a good bedroom farce is clearly present on the screenplay level. I wish that was enough to make it a good movie, but to praise this film because of its screenplay is like praising a condemned building because its blueprints were drawn well -- all of the potential for a well-constructed product may be there, but the result is still a wreck.
I took notes while watching this movie -- already a bad sign, since it means I wasn't too busy sitting back and enjoying what was playing out on the screen. The first note I made concerned the pacing. This is a story and a script which doesn't just require, but desperately cries out for madcap slapstick and rapid-fire delivery. Comedy often requires a fast pace, and farce demands it outright. Yet with A Countess From Hong Kong, every actor speaks with patient deliberation, and every shot lingers for a few beats too long -- just long enough to kill the comic potential in every scene.
Speaking of actors, this cast simply has no winners (with one very small exception I'll get to in a minute). The performances aren't bad as far as acting goes, so much as they are simply inappropriate for the genre; everybody in the whole movie makes the same mistake, delivering their lines with quiet earnestness when the dialogue so very clearly requires desperation and confusion. Marlon Brando is particularly miscast, providing an all-too serious interpretation of what should have been a funny character.
This is the movie that has finally convinced me that my friend Laurie is right about comedy necessarily stemming from frustration rather than anger. (Laurie insists that she got this theory from Norman Lear, but when I asked Norman Lear, he says he got the theory from Laurie.) Brando plays many of his scenes in this movie not with increasing frustration, which could have been hilarious, but rather with an undercurrent of intense, near-to-boiling-over fury. This was a trademark acting style for Brando, and in drama, it works wonders. In comedy, it completely destroys any attempt at light-heartedness. There is a scene, for example, in which Ogden finds Natascha wearing his pajamas without his permission, and he demands that she remove them immediately or he will take them off for her. The attempted humor to the scene -- the writer's intention is so clear, that it's a shame it doesn't play out as planned -- is that Ogden's frustration level is so through the roof that he doesn't realize the inevitable, sexual implications behind his demand that Natascha immediately remove her clothing. It occurs to Natscha, though, whose teasing comments go right over Ogden's head as he chases her about the room in an attempt to rip the clothing from her.
Had Brando played this scene with comical frustration, the result would have been a delightful mixture of eroticism and slapstick. But with Brando's barely contained rage, Ogden' doesn't come off as an oblivious innocent, but as a disturbed, possibly dangerous man. The extent to which Brando's choice is so wrong for this scene is exacerbated by the fact that Sophia Loren seems to understand the intent behind the humor, and has fun with it. The result is a really odd mismatch of stylistic interpretations of the same scene; on the one hand, you have Loren gaily laughing and cavorting about the room, and then you have Brando, who looks like he's going to tear her head off if he ever catches her.
I understand that Brando did a good job in the farce Guys and Dolls, but in A Countess From Hong Kong, he is simply dead wrong as the comic leading man. Plug Sid Caesar or Dick van Dyke into this role, and you probably would have had something. But Brando? What comically-challenged idiot thought to cast Marlon Brando as the leading man in what should have been a wacky comedy?
The answer to that question is what's weird about this movie failing so completely, because it was directed, produced, and written by none other than Charlie Chaplin, one of the greatest comedy minds of his or any other generation. It's hard, even mind-blowing, to reconcile Chaplin's genius with his complete bungling of this movie. And yet Chaplin is responsible not only for the miscasting of Brando in the lead role -- a terrible choice that is hard to fathom -- but also for the incompetently drawn-out pace that kills so much of -- in fact, all of -- whatever comic potential remains.
I earlier mentioned that there was one small exception in this cast, and that is Chaplin himself, who has two very brief scenes as a porter. An old man at this point in his career, Chaplin gave himself very, very little to do in his scenes, which amount to nothing more than an unimportant cameo. But if you watch the movie, note how his energy and positivity give each scene a small boost. It's not nearly enough to make up for everything else that goes wrong in every scene, but it's a small something. It proves that, at least on a performer's level, Chaplin understood what was needed for the movie. That's precisely what makes such a mystery out of his complete failure to turn this potentially fun farce into anything other than a dull disappointment.
posted by Movie Man at
11:38 PM
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