The lapses of genius are always interesting, sometimes baffling, and inevitably sad. The important thing is that they don't, in the long run. greatly matter. Genius means, as often as not, an infinite capacity for taking risks: and with an artist like Chaplin, who has played for high stakes and never been concerned to hedge his bets, there is no possibility of failure in any small way. His new film. A King in New York, is for me as much of a failure as Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight were successes. Those were flawed masterpieces; this seems a failure that occasionally—but only occasionally—touches the edge of brilliance. And it is a film that appears at once important and of little lasting account; immensely revealing and discussable, as any work of Chaplin's must be, and at the same time a picture by which one would no more consider judging its creator than one would judge Shaw by one of his very late plays. This is not to suggest that A King in New York looks like the work of an ageing man, something to be written off as coming out of the dim twilight of an artist. It has a good deal more to it than that. If it stands apart from Chaplin's other work, it is because here the artist's comment on his times reflects not the sureness of knowledge but the uncertainty of betrayal. (p. 78)

After the great defiant statements of Monsieur Verdoux, the twilight wisdom of Limelight, the actual words of A King in New York seem muffled and indistinct. Very early in his career, Chaplin made his major discovery as an artist: that great truths are mostly very simple. Since he took to speech, his danger has always appeared to lie in assuming that the converse also applies. The true, great satire on McCarthyism that Chaplin might have given us would not have been content with pointing out that committees can easily be made to look foolish and that people who stand in the way of a machine are likely to get hurt. There is also the state of mind, the climate in which the excrescence flourishes. Missing it, the film misses more than that; the great weapon of laughter misfires; the McCarthyist committee is drenched, but not lampooned.

Chaplin's laughter has always been that of humanity. In A King in New York, it runs thinly and at times almost sourly….

If one finds oneself withholding laughter, it is perhaps because Chaplin so often invites us to laugh not with but at Shahdov. Elements of Charlie have survived into the other characters he has played: the loneliness of Verdoux, the immense pathos of Calvero, carried on Charlie's great role of tragic comedian. Others may find King Shahdov a figure of pathos; and in the scenes with the boy, the practical, protective tenderness, one gets glimpses of the wonderful sadness of Limelight. But on the whole, the spruce, debonair king, surveying the world from a hotel room he is unable to pay for, pursuing his vague plans for improving conditions through the peaceful use of atomic energy, remains enigmatic. We laugh at his embarrassments, but they are those of a stranger.

This impression of remoteness persists through the film's technical shortcomings. It is a pity, for instance, that Berkeley Square should form such an instantly recognisable background to one scene; that the mob of angry revolutionaries attacking the king's palace in the opening episode should resemble nothing so much as an English shopping crowd besieging the counters on the first day of the sales. These things would not, I think, have mattered in any previous Chaplin film. He has often been charged with making his films badly, which as a rule has meant simply that he has not been concerned with technical effect. Everything that he wanted to express has found expression, and if style means the correct relationship between ends and means, then Chaplin has been in every sense a film-maker of style. If this relationship no longer seems to exist in A King in New York, then one must look beyond mere technical deficiencies for the reasons.

I have tried in this review to indicate what I think these to be: distance, withdrawal, uncertainty, a wasting of satirical ammunition on insignificant targets and a hesitancy before the big theme. Where Limelight seemed like a homecoming, a return to the scenes and places out of which Chaplin's art developed, A King in New York has about it the remoteness of exile. (p. 79)