Monsieur Verdoux (1947/Criterion Blu-ray)
Picture: B+
Sound: B+ Extras: A- Film: B+
Upon its initial release in 1947, Charlie Chaplin
told Collier’s Magazine that “[Monsieur] Verdoux is the
only one of my films with which I have been satisfied. Funny as it is, it has a
great morality.” At the time, critics
and audiences mostly disagreed. Monsieur
Verdoux was Chaplin’s second talkie and first out of the Little Tramp
guise, and it seemed to trivialize the decidedly untrivial matter of serial
killing. (In short, Verdoux (Chaplin) is
a French banker left unemployed when the Depression hits, so he goes about
providing for himself and family by turning Bluebeard, seducing, murdering, and
robbing a litany of lonely, gullible, slightly nutty women.) The film was a box office failure, and
despite a vocal minority (James Agee, Gilbert Seldes, and Andre Bazin among
them) crushed critically.
The rejection followed three points: Chaplin wasn’t the Tramp, Chaplin was
moralizing, and Chaplin was a commie.
The last point was bound to graft itself on to anything Chaplin made in
this period. Postwar America was an unkind place to anyone not in lockstep with
the increasingly conservative majority, and Chaplin was not only a
nonconformist he was a foreigner with a record of quasi-un-American wartime
sentiments and morally-questionable decisions – three strikes in the eyes of
frothing nationalists. But seen today,
66 years later, how you react to Verdoux still mostly comes down to how
you deal with those first two issues.
The easiest one to swat away is that he’s not the Tramp. It’s undeniable that
Chaplin is decidedly a different character in Verdoux (to my knowledge,
the Tramp never bludgeoned dozens of people over the head with his cane and hid
their lifeless bodies in the name of earning a living), and if all you know of
Chaplin is the stick-swinging slapstick icon then watching this film might be
jarring. But we’re far enough removed
from the Tramp’s moment that we watch Modern Times or City Lights
today for Chaplin, not the character he plays.
The Little Tramp film has become a subgenre of the broader
categorization of the Chaplin picture.
As such, Verdoux is, today, a Chaplin film
delightfully free of the Tramp’s baggage and we can appreciate the comedy on
its own terms. The film isn’t Chaplin’s
funniest movie, or even his most sophisticated, but it’s arguably his most
mature. The humor is born out of
trapping characters in double speak and linguistic cul-de-sacs. Verdoux engages his victims in the
rat-a-tat-tat style of screwball comedies (something of a tell that Chaplin is
playing catch up with cinema comedy), while they look bemused, befuddled, or
bored by his antics. The film hits its
high note in this regard when Verdoux tries, gloriously unsuccessfully, to
separate dimwitted millionaire Annabella (Martha Raye) from her riches and
life. Unlike his other victims,
Annabella is kind of a floozy and intellectual lightweight, but she keeps
Verdoux off balance thanks to her blunt character. The scenes between Raye and Chaplin are
inspired moments of verbal and physical comedy (the scene of the two on the
lake is particularly excellent), on par with anything in his other, “funnier”
films.
But despite its comedic achievements, Verdoux is saddled with an
overwrought, hypocritical moralizing that’s impossible to ignore or
justify. As he does at the end of The
Great Dictator, Chaplin presents, via a speech directly to the
audience, his statement of principals. After Verdoux is captured, tried,
convicted, and sentenced to death, he stands in the courtroom and says, in
essence, human life is so devalued by war and industrialized killing that his
crimes are hardly worth the outrage:
“However remiss the prosecutor has been in complimenting
me, he at least admits that I have brains.
Thank you, Monsieur, I have. And
for 35 years I used them honestly. After
that, nobody wanted them. So I was
forced to go into business for myself.
As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for
the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it
not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by
comparison.”
If a speech like that were given in, say, an
episode of Law & Order by a man arrested for the murder of dozens
of women, we would recoil in horror if not for how patently ridiculous the
equivalency is. But since it comes from
Chaplin, we’re apt to shout “Hurrah!”
Yet, after turning this over in my head, I’m not
sure what we’re supposed to take away from it.
Is Chaplin condemning Verdoux as an insane psychopath, or is he using
Verdoux as a cipher for his beliefs about how humanity is destroying
itself? I’m inclined to think it’s the
latter, given the tone, tenor, and naivety of the speech at the end of The
Great Dictator. And while there is a
kernel of truth in the sentiment that war is business and killing is the cost
of doing it, in no civilized society does that excuse the crimes Verdoux
commits. In fact, he’s so nihilistic and
devoid of empathy that “serial killer” seems his natural state – he just needed
a nudge to get him to embrace it.
The enigmatic nature of this speech is,
ultimately, what doomed Verdoux on its original release. No one wanted to hear Chaplin try to justify
serial murder as globally inconsequential.
And yet, the film endures – not because it’s great, it isn’t, but
because it continues to challenge us and our conceptions of Chaplin and
cinematic comedy more than 60 years after its release. But it’s not an easy film to watch or crack,
despite its moments of comedic bravado. We’re
not left euphoric, as after something like City Lights, nor do we feel
vicariously satisfied, as with The Great Dictator. Instead, we feel kind of grimy and spent,
even a little dead inside. Indeed, we’re
made complicit in his acts by virtue of watching the film, and therefore
condemned to Verdoux’s fate. We’re Verdoux’s final victims.
Monsieur Verdoux was
released by the Criterion Collection in March and joins Modern Times, The
Great Dictator, and The Gold Rush in the Criterion Chaplin
catalogue. While it isn’t the best of
the Chaplin releases, it more than holds its own against the standard bearers (Modern
Times, The Gold Rush) and is a marked improvement over previous
releases.
The new 2K digital restoration of Verdoux
found on the Blu-Ray looks great. The picture is crisp and clean, with
excellent contrasts in blacks, whites, and grays. There are only a few moments
of softness, grain, and wear, but they hardly distract from watching the film.
Similarly, the uncompressed PCM Mono soundtrack is solid. Verdoux isn’t a
particularly dynamic film, aurally speaking, but sound effects like the pop of
a wine cork, the rustle of a suit, or the low hum of a rumbling furnace have
room to breathe alongside the film’s otherwise treacly score (composed by
Chaplin).
As you’d expect from a Criterion release, Verdoux
is packed with extras, included two documentaries: Chaplin Today: “Monsieur
Verdoux” from 2003 and the new Charlie Chaplin and the American Press. Both features provide excellent context for
the making of the film and the issues surrounding Chaplin at the time of its
release. Additionally, there is an
illustrated audio interview with actor Marilyn Nash, who plays the one woman in
the film who is spared Verdoux’s wrath, and a collection of radio ads and
trailers. The customary booklet features
an essay from critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, a letter written by Chaplin at the
time of the film’s release, and excerpts from a piece defending Verdoux written
by André Bazin.
If you’re a fan of this film – or of Chaplin, or
of unique Hollywood moviemaking – Criterion’s Verdoux release deserves a
spot next to their other Chaplin releases on your shelf.
- Dante
A. Ciampaglia
