A KING IN NEW YORK

When the deposed European King Shadov (Charlie Chaplin) arrives in New York as a new exile, he realizes he must earn a living and accidentally discovers that television commercials afford him the opportunity to do just that. But he also discovers that lurking beneath the seeming free-wheeling American commercialism in the 1950s is a grim mean-spiritedness that threatens to crush the most innocent of its citizens along with its perceived 'enemies.'

“Charlie Chaplin, directing himself in his last starring role, lets fly with anarchic humor and political outrage. He plays the refined and worthy King Shahdov, deposed and exiled from the land of Estrovia for his rejection of nuclear arms, who arrives in New York as a broke celebrity and is taught by a pushy and seductive adwoman (Dawn Addams) how to cash in on his fame—at the price of his dignity. Chaplin—who, at the time the film was released, in 1957, was nearing seventy and banned from the U.S. on political grounds—lacerates American follies with razor-sharp comic ingenuity. His targets include rock music, popular movies, plastic surgery, money worship, progressive schools, and media vulgarity (his riotous invention of the ‘Real Life Surprise Party’ broadcast foreshadows the age of reality TV), but he reserves his fiercest barbs for the McCarthyite campaign of intimidation and cruelty that he himself had endured. Chaplin disdainfully, derisively satirizes his real-life accusers, and he casts his young son, Michael, in the wrenching role of a precocious ideologue whose father is an unfriendly witness.” - Richard Brody