[A KING IN NEW YORK screens Friday May 27th at 9:25 p.m. and Saturday May 28th at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque]
Review by Charles Cassady Jr.
Though far from successful, A KING IN NEW YORK, Charlie Chaplin's scattershot 1957 satire of American life, is a fascinating artifact. I remember it being heavily peddled on Super 8mm format in the great old Blackhawk Films catalogue I grew up receiving, and it always intrigued me that it seemed to be in the part of the Chaplin filmography that most critics didn't want to talk about, the duds. The flick is impossible to separate from the backstory: In real life Chaplin had literally fled the USA where he was once such a beloved entertainer, having been red-baited by McCarthy right-wingers and sleazy news columnists. He even won a libel suit against one of them, somebody called Hy Gardner. As a youth I read Hy Gardner's memoirs (yes, I had no friends), and let's just say I wonder if Glenn Beck is Hy Gardner thawed out of Limbaugh the Hutt's carbon-freeze. Just a theory.