[A King in New York] is produced in typical Chaplin style—tackily. The lighting, photography, settings and editing are banal and cheap. The music is music-hall. The concern for accuracy is so small that, in what is supposed to be New York, the doors to a theater orchestra are labeled "Stalls," an elevator is labeled "Lift," and in a street scene we see the office of a famous London bookmaker. The direction is, as always, Chaplin-centered and theater-oriented. Most of the actors seem hardly to have been directed at all, and the predominant motions of the film are of actors' entrances and exits, rather than any intrinsic cinematic mode. (p. 247)

The script, by Chaplin, seems a series of ad hoc inventions with only the vaguest general plan. Whenever the phone rings or the door-buzzer sounds in Shadhov's hotel suite, which is the story's "basic" set you know that the sagging plot is going to get another boost…. The script has … effective satire on film violence, wide screens and TV commercialism. The one consistency in this adventitious collection of bits is that most of the seeming disasters turn out to be advantageous. Shadhov is trapped by a hidden camera into making a TV spectacle of himself, and it transforms him into a celebrity. He "blows" a TV whiskey commercial by coughing, and it makes him a comedy hit. The implication—that nothing is too ridiculous for American success if only it's sufficiently "exposed"—is much better satire than any of the political stuff. And into the midst of all this topical satire Chaplin thrusts his inevitable Dickensian strand—the lonely misunderstood schoolboy. (pp. 247-48)

If this film were by and with anyone else—a stupidly impossible conjecture—it would simply be bad. But being Chaplin's, it has many fascinations even in its faults. It's the last film he will ever make—he subsequently directed the unfortunate Countess from Hong Kong (1966) but appeared only briefly in it—and it's one that makes ultraclear what happened to his latter-day career. As political satire it's feeble, as cultural satire it's moderately keen, as self-revelation by Chaplin, it's an essential work.

First, it shows most vividly how schizoid the later Chaplin had become. In all Chaplin films up to The Great Dictator there was only one Chaplin, the Tramp. In the anti-Nazi film he played two roles which at least were tonally related; the real split came at the end when he launched into the long, controversial speech. There the "serious" Chaplin divorced himself from the clown, as if in fear that the clown whose very persona had won him his claims to seriousness, was no longer serious enough—or not explicitly serious…. In A King in New York the schism between comedy and seriousness is not only deepened but takes on another color. Shadhov represents not only Chaplin's politically and socially conscious self but Chaplin himself as King—the King that the Tramp had made him!… True, strands of the Tramp-persona are intermittently woven through the King-persona…. But the integrated character of the great films is gone, split into a comedy person and the (very literally) self-conscious creator of that comedy.

This schism derives from the schism in film history: the advent of sound. The classy Chaplin, the speechmaking Chaplin, the intellectual parvenu, would have been inconceivable in silent films. He was worried by sound, and he resisted speech in the first two films he made in the sound era, City Lights and Modern Times—his last two great works. When he succumbed to speech, it took over and hag-rode him; he overcompensated for his earlier resistance. He split his world-worshipped character in two and made the "serious" half a vehicle for talk; but sound also affected the comedy self, usually adversely. The moment here when he is fingerprinted by the Immigration Department at the airport as he talks about his joy at being in free America would have been funnier in dumbshow with subtitles, without the limitations of Chaplin's limited voice and the fact of the words. Shadhov recites "To be or not to be" as a party entertainment—misquoting it, incidentally—but it's neither funny nor an effective instance of the classic clown-as-Hamlet idea which Chaplin wants us to admire.

So, under or above all, A King in New York shows how the coming of sound was a curse to Chaplin; how its freedoms dissipated his strengths; how his attempts to exploit it intellectually and ideologically played to his weaknesses, not his strengths; how, in short, he was much more grievously hurt by history in art than by history in politics. (pp. 248-49)