Word: chaplinitis
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Along with City Lights, Charles Chaplin considers A Countess From Hong Kong his best film. That in itself doesn't mean very much; traditionally, film directors either prefer their most recent film or have a tendency to love the disaster, the film Otto Preminger describes as "one's sick child." If you're willing to take the word of the uniformly unfavorable newspaper reviews, Chaplin's preference for countess over his other films can be written off on one of these two counts. But you'd be making a mistake. Chaplin knows what he's talking about, and A Countess...
Limelight was essentially a tragedy, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, and A King In New York bitter social satires. Countess, his first film in over ten years, marks Chaplin's return to a kind of comedy he hadn't created since Modern Times. In many respects the comedy is similar to that of the earlier films. Though American comedy since Lubitsch and Wilder has tended increasingly toward the verbal, Chaplin still largely ignores the potential of comic dialogue, emphasizing the visual jokes instead...
...part of the film; the critics pounced on awkward exchanges (NATASCHA: "Careful, these pajamas are transparent!" OGDEN: "So are you!") and lines like Brando's "I want you to know this is the first real happiness I've known." But criticizing the dialogue on conventional grounds is meaningless; in Chaplin's film, lines have little significance in themselves. The dialogue cannot be divorced from how a character says his line or what he looks like while he's saying it: these factors combine to form complete characterizations. Chaplin has carefully directed the line-readings of his cast...
Criticism of Chaplin's old-fashioned visual style and relentlessly stationery camera not withstanding, few directors use the camera as successfully to convey characterizations: he holds a close-up of Tippi Hedren just long enough for the actress to become uncomfortable, and in the context of the scene, Chaplin is able to transfer that quality of detached restlessness from her to the character she is playing...
...flipped over from a half-lotus position, uncoiled her legs into a handstand and then snapped up into a foot grab that would give any contortionist a charley horse. "It's marvelous,'" said Actress Geraldine Chaplin, 22. Charley's daughter started with yoga when she was 13, so her limbs are used to all the pretzeling. "I don't really go beyond the physical side of it," said Geraldine in her Madrid apartment, which she has set up as home base and gymnasium for rest between films. Does the rest include sleeping on nails...