“An egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher”: When Charlie Chaplin directed Marlon Brando to disaster
On paper, a creative partnership between two of the most influential and storied talents of their respective generations had the potential to yield cinematic excellence, but the opposite turned out to be true when the tantalising duo of Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando worked together.
The former was celebrated as one of the most important and globally-recognised figures in cinema history, who blazed a trail for the auteurs that would follow by using his success as a springboard to retain creative autonomy as the writer, director, producer, star, editor, and composer on the majority of his star vehicles.
The latter, meanwhile, has reinvented the very notion of big screen acting by adopting the method approach and bringing it to the masses, with multiple generations of thespians holding Brando in the highest esteem as the single greatest actor in the history of celluloid.
1967’s A Countess from Hong Kong was also a passion project of Chaplin’s that he’d been developing since the early 1930s; it was only the second feature he’d directed – and first since 1923 – where he hadn’t played a major role on-screen, it was his maiden foray into colour filmmaking, and it turned out to be the final movie of his career before his death ten years later.
Those ingredients realistically should have resulted in a fantastic picture, especially when the supporting cast roped in Sophia Loren and Tippi Hedren to lend esteemed and star-powered support, but A Countess from Hong Kong was shunned by critics and ignored by audiences, failing to even recoup a third of its production budget at the domestic box office.
As somebody who’d gained a reputation for maintaining a stranglehold over their creative endeavours, Chaplin’s desire to maintain creative control inevitably proved an ill-fitting match for Brando’s method immersion, especially when Hedren outlined that the naturalistic performer was being instructed how to pitch his performance right down to the very minutiae during rehearsals.
“Chaplin’s method was to act out all our different roles, which was brilliant to watch,” she shared with The Guardian. “Instead of directing, he’d get out there on set and say: ‘OK, do this’, and show us how. He’d become Sophia Loren. He’d become me and Marlon. It was really unusual and I’d never seen it happen before. Can you imagine Marlon Brando handling that?”
Needless to say, Brando didn’t handle it very well at all, with Hedren revealing that “Marlon was so insulted to see someone acting out his role” that he wanted to quit A Countess from Hong Kong altogether. He didn’t quite follow through on his threat, but only after “Charlie had to convince him to stay on”.
In his memoirs, Brando would describe Chaplin as “a fearsomely cruel man”, “the most sadistic man I’d ever met”, and “an egotistical tyrant and a penny pincher”. Beyond the feuding director and star, illness ran rampant throughout the set to cause numerous delays, adding further tension to an already-fraught environment.
Realistically, Chaplin taking a backseat and directing his last film and first in colour with the best actor in the business leading the line should have been a fitting way to bow out and tie a bow around an inimitable career, but in the end, the union of two all-timers came in a critically-panned, money-losing misfire that never found them on the same page.