RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Michael_Elliott A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)** (out of 4) The wealthy Ogden Mears (Marlon Brando) is in Hong Kong where he is partying a bit one night and then wakes up the next morning with his ship on its way to the next location. The only problem is that Natascha (Sophia Loren) has decided to stowaway on the boat and Mears must keep her hidden so that no one sees her.A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG would turn out to be the final film from the legendary Charles Chaplin. It's really too bad this film was so lame and it's just shocking because you've got Chaplin, Brando and Loren. Three legends of the big screen and it turns into a movie like this. It seems everyone hated one another but this here really doesn't show on the screen. The biggest problem is that this film was simply made thirty years too late.I say that because the structure is something you'd see from a screwball comedy in the 1930s. I mean, why in 1967 would someone be worried about a woman being found in his room? There are many scenes where the two are frantically going from one hiding spot to the next and Brando takes a couple falls along the way. It's just not that funny. In fact, very little is actually funny here and while it's an okay time killer, the film just never adds up to much.I thought Loren was good enough in her role. She's strikingly beautiful and her in that white evening gown was one of the few highlights. As far as Brando goes, yeah, this wasn't the type of role for him. Apparently Chaplin wanted Cary Grant or David Niven and Brando certainly isn't either of them. He's way too stiff in the part and the constant fighting between him and Chaplin behind the camera probably didn't make him want to be much better. He's not horrid in the part but it's clear that he's not right for it.A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG has pretty much been forgotten over the years and it's easy to see why. The film isn't quite as awful as its reputation but when you've got three legends in one movie you just expect more.

Norton S While watching movies like "Blade Runner", Leone's brilliant "Spaghetti Westerns" and "Once Upon a Time in America" or Chaplin's "A Countess from Hong Kong" you may found yourself wondering of why these exquisite pieces of art were at the time bashed by critics. If you'll read those critical reviews you'll find that the critics' statements are at least weak if not laughably delusional. However some of those criticisms are now reconsidered, other false critical statements are still spoiling minds of public with rather biased claims.If you'll watch "A Countess from Hong Kong" without knowing anything about background of this movie (abstracting from your knowledge about Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando and their history), you'll see masterful comedy which will make you laugh to the tears, which is performed by excellent actors (just watch ingenious Sophia Loren's gestures in the silent cinema style), filled with eloquent music and bearing deep social context. Kind of comedy that filmed maximum once in a decade, moreover, in my opinion, "they don't make them like that anymore".So what the problem with all that tendentious critical reviews? George Orwell in his BBC broadcast in 1941 (published as "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda" and "Literature and Totalitarianism") noted about new tendencies in literature criticism that "this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics - politics in the most general sense - have invaded literature, to an extent that does not normally happen, and this has brought to the surface of our consciousness the struggle that always goes on between the individual and the community. It is when one considers the difficulty of writing honest unbiased criticism in a time like ours that one begins to grasp the nature of the threat that hangs over the whole of literature in the coming age... criticism of the older kind - criticism that is really judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded, treating a work of art as a thing of value in itself - has been next door to impossible".Sad to say but it seems like all those critical bashing of Leone's films as well as attacks on the Chaplin's last movie, filmed after his banning from the United States, have nothing in common with true art criticism. In Chaplin's case it is simple political persecution, in Leone's case - fear of competition and the inability to accept new art forms in something, previously considered exclusively American (yes, best Westerns are European). You can notice almost same thing happening now with Eastwood's "American Sniper" - only in the last case critics from the left wing are unable to recognise "Sniper's" aesthetic merits, bashing it simply as pro-war and "conservative". Paraphrasing Orwell, we can say that film criticism "has almost ceased to be aesthetic. It has been swamped by propaganda". Moreover, most dangerous and clever criticism of such kind tries to hide its true nature, avoiding direct political statements and imitating aesthetic criticism, discouraging public from film appreciation, which is not so hard to achieve if such criticism is shared on the large scale. This is the reality public shall take into consideration while listening to modern criticism. We must not allow to biased and dishonest people, which call themselves "critics", to spoil our minds. Their best interests are not public's best interests.As for the "A Countess from Hong Kong" - it is simply a comedy masterpiece, a must see film for all true movie fans. 9 out of 10

aubygene What seemed to be "out of decade movie" by some critics--it was obvious they had missed the point! It was meant to that! Mr. Chaplin was making a "tongue in cheek" movie as a "throw-back" to the days when such movies were made. As for Brando, he was the somewhat "strait-man" in playing the part of a very important man caught up in a situation that was confusing, funny, and serious all at the same time. He was thinking, "What kind of impact is this situation going to have on my career?! I laughed all the way through the movie. My wife really "got-in-to-it" when Sofia's husband was trying to get comfortable in the bed next to her. Obviously, he was not accustomed to being with women!

nyp01 Well, *I'm* certainly not going to pan a Charlie Chaplin film. Like all his films, it's certainly worth viewing. While it doesn't completely gel as a whole, it is an artistic film - that is to say it is an expression of the artist's vision of life at a certain point in his life - for Chaplin, the final years. There is dialog about politics, about death, sex, love, art. These comments often fly by at the speed of lighthearted comedy, but it is worth the time to watch the film a second time to catch them all.I found Brando's performance mesmerizing, though, again, did not gel with the film as a whole. Add to this the fact that he is acting with much inferior actors (Sophia Loren and Sydney Chaplin do not come to mind as great actors of Brando's caliber, as impressive as they may be).My chief regret is that the film was not as funny as I'd hoped. The glaring exception was the scene with the bedridden British dowager, played to hilarious perfection by Margaret Rutherford.