FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

I don't see any great difference between the first and the second parts of A King in New York. I didn't expect to laugh. We all read the newspapers, and I was well aware of Chaplin's misfortunes in America. I knew what his new film was about and I knew how profoundly sad his preceding films were. We could have known that A King in New York would be the saddest of all, also the most personal. The man who made The Gold Rush can, if he wants to, make his public laugh or cry at will; he knows all the tricks; he's an ace, that's sure. If we neither cry nor laugh at A King in New York, it's because Chaplin made up his mind to touch our heads instead of our hearts. The awful gentleness of this film makes me think of [Resnais's] Nuit et Brouillard, which also rejected the simplemindedness of the propagandist or the hater. (pp. 58-9)

The film doesn't broaden out or force itself on the viewer. There are no scenes that are amusing or ironic or bitter. It is a rapid and dry demonstration of a single point, almost like a documentary. The shots of New York and the two images of airplanes that Chaplin inserts are like a montage of documents. A King in New York is not comparable to a novel or a poem; it is more like an article, a few pages from a journal called "Charlie Chaplin comments freely on political reality." (p. 59)

If A King in New York is not amusing, it's because Joe McCarthy's America represents a depressing world. It's an autobiographical film and there's no complacency about it. If it's a sadder slice of life than the ones that went before it, it's because Chaplin understands that the most agonizing problem of the time is not poverty or mistakes in the name of progress, but an organized attack on freedom in a world of informants.

"The work of art," Jean Genêt says somewhere, "must resolve the drama, not merely present it." Charlie Chaplin resolves the drama. It's a gift of great lucidity. (p. 60)