I SUPPOSE ONE should learn by experience, but I have
to admit I came within an ace of missing the new Chaplin film A King in New York after reading (and being depressed by) the reviews. I got the impression that those writers who admired Chaplin were desperately trying to find something good to say of the film, while those who did not were smugly saying, '1 told you so.' It is seldom funny, sometimes hysterical, and almost always predictable,' Mr. Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer; and though I have always found Mr. Tynan's judgment—except of acting—suspect, I was almost deceived. Now 'funny' is admittedly a subjective judgment, but I am prepared to stake my oath, after seeing it, that if The Gold Rush and Modern Times were funny, so is A King in New York, and for precisely the same reasons. And the charge of hysteria is simply untrue : the film is so gentle in its approach that it would hardly cause offence even to a Faubus. Compared to, say, Sweet Smell of Success, On the Waterfront or End as a Man it is positively sentimental. And as for the 'bilious comments' which Mr. Tynan criticises on passport-withdrawals and on inform- ing, and the scene which many reviewers have objected to where the boy delivers an enormous and ill-digested political harangue, was it not understood that they are meant to be funny? Incidentally, they are.
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