A Countess from Hong Kong

A bedroom farce about women left stateless and vulnerable by two world wars requires the Lubitsch Touch at the very least. Chaplin’s touch invests Brando’s American diplomat Ogden with his progressive views if not the Tramp’s lithe spirit, so we have our humanitarian hero lumbering to keep up with Sophia Loren (a veteran of Italian comedies) as she leaps from bedroom to stateroom and back again as a stowaway Russian escaping prostitution in Hong Kong on a ship bound for the US. Extended slapstick and a Chaplin cameo remind us what this film might have been if he, and the world, were younger.