Chaplin’s next film, Monsieur Verdoux, a self-described “comedy of murders,” completed the divorce, and for Chaplin it could not have come at a worse time. The popular highs he had enjoyed in the 1920s and ’30s were crashing on the rocky shoals of the fickle American public imagination, which has been inundated with tabloid stories about Chaplin’s marital infidelities, paternity suits, and ridiculous accusations of communist sympathies. In Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin plays the titular character, a charming, aristocratic serial killer who preys on wealthy older women, marries them, and murders them for their money. Although still an underdog of sorts, Henri Verdoux is a far cry from the Little Tramp, even though Chaplin daringly (ruthlessly?) evokes his most famous creation in the film’s final moments when Verdoux is marched to the guillotine (a detail I don’t mind revealing since the film opens with Verdoux’s headstone and a voice-over narration in which he assures us that his life as a “bluebeard” has not led to a good end).

Based on an idea by Orson Welles, who was inspired to make a film about the early 20th-century French serial killer Henri Landru, Monsieur Verdoux is a pitch-black, arguably bitter comedy that wasn’t so much a departure for Chaplin (he had, after all, lampooned Hitler in his previous film) as it was an opportunity to fully engage with his darker comedic impulses. It also continued his increasing desire to make “message films,” although this time the message was not delivered as smoothly as it was in Modern Times or The Great Dictator. The film was a flop when it was first released, partially due to Chaplin’s dwindling popularity and image issues, although it is now considered one of his more daring features, a film that may not generate the kind of laugh-out-loud moments characteristic of his most popular films, but nevertheless develops a tone of ruthless comedic timing and satirical intrigue. Chaplin goes for big laughs here and there, but mostly he’s content to let the film simmer as Verdoux goes about his amusingly bloody business.

The film’s comedic high points involve Verdoux’s interactions with Annabella Bonheur (Martha Raye), one of his many “wives.” Unlike the other women on whom he preys, who tend to be dour and humorless, Annabella is a shrill-voiced live wire with a mind she doesn’t mind speaking. Made wealthy by winning the lottery, she is the very epitome of “new money,” as the uncouth tendencies of her previous life have become horribly ensnared with a new sense of privilege and power. Raye, a vaudeville veteran with impeccable timing and a larger-than-life screen presence, is the perfect foil for Chaplin’s Verdoux, whose studious attempts to maintain an air of decorum and cultural richness contrasts with her strident demands and complete lack of propriety (in many ways she plays the same role that comedian Jack Oakie played in The Great Dictator, whose Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, hilariously undercut all of Hynkle’s neurotic attempts to convey superiority). It is no wonder that he has an awful time trying to bump her off; she’s a force of nature beyond his control, and he never looks more foolish (or small) than when he’s in her presence. Perhaps the funniest sequence in the film finds Verdoux trying to hide from Annabella when she unexpectedly shows up at his latest wedding, unaware of who the groom is.

The daring of Monsieur Verdoux lies in the fact that it makes no bones about presenting its title character in a sympathetic light. Chaplin does not play Verdoux as a monster, but rather as a man whose economic victimization (after 30 years, he was laid off as a bank clerk following the worldwide depression) has forced him into a life of crime as the only means of supporting his wheelchair-bound wife (Mady Correll) and young son (“These are desperate days,” he says at one point). Chaplin, often accused of being a sentimentalist, further complicates our relationship to the character, however, by suggesting that Verdoux’s wife is perfectly happy being poor, which lends his criminal deeds an air of selfishness, as if he is using his family as an excuse to fulfill his own monetary desires. He is using them just as surely as he is using the matrons he seduces, fleeces, and murders. Yet, Chaplin plays the character with such a mix of ruthlessness, silliness, and sympathy that we can’t help but like him on some level, even admire his audacity. (It’s little surprise that the Production Code Administration, which could not accept any film that showed criminal conduct in a sympathetic light, initially rejected the film at the script stage; Chaplin’s eventual dealings with the PCA were so extensive that it took 12 pages of his autobiography to detail them.)

Chaplin’s own audacity leads him into the film’s final act, where he reveals that Monsieur Verdoux is not just a darkly comic portrait of a sociopath, but rather an indictment of society’s violent tendencies, the kind that makes bumping off old widows seem paltry by comparison. After being tried and convicted, Verdoux essentially exonerates himself by blaming the whole of society, suggesting that his own turn to violence is the only option in a world constantly going to war and living under the threat of atomic destruction. “Wars, conflict—it’s all business,” he tells a reporter near the end of the film. “One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!” Chaplin’s moral indictment spoken through Verdoux is undeniably spot-on, but the manner in which he addresses it is problematic for the film as a whole. Much like he did at the end of The Great Dictator, Chaplin, who resisted synchronized dialogue for so long, relies heavily of speechifying through his characters to make his point. It worked in the previous film, but here it feels tacked on, even if we recognize in retrospect how it informs the previous two hours of the film. Had Chaplin found a way to better integrate the film’s philosophical ideas with its narrative, Monsieur Verdoux might rightly be considered one of his masterpieces. Unfortunately, as it stands it is more of an interesting experiment, a daring attempt by a popular filmmaker to call society as a whole to the carpet for both its misdeeds and its blind eye.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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