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A Countess From Hong Kong, the last film written, produced and directed by Charlie Chaplin, premieres in London. Set primarily on a luxury ocean liner sailing to New York, Chaplin’s woefully out-dated thirty year old script posits a miscast Marlon Brando as an American ambassador who gets caught up in a contrived vaudevillian farce after he discovers an asylum-seeking Russian countess (Sophia Loren) hiding in his cabin. A tone deaf swansong from a once peerless artist futilely labouring under the delusion that the comic pratfall schtik of a bygone era is still an essential ingredient in the construction of a contemporary comedy. The film is a box-office dud, but the Chaplin-penned theme, This Is My Song, recorded by Petula Clark, becomes a huge international hit.
