Monsieur Verdoux
d. Charles Chaplin, 1947
I haven't seen enough of Chaplin's films to call this his best work (although I do prefer it to The Gold Rush [1925] and City Lights [1931]), but it's certainly brilliant. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred in Monsieur Verdoux, one of his last films. Verdoux is a formally astonishing black comedy about a cynical man who provides for his family by killing women and taking their money. But this isn't one of those movies where we see some monster committing crimes and at the end we are supposed to learn some moral lesson about proper conduct; Chaplin's much too ambitious for that nonsense. Here he is using the pathos of his silent films to make us, though not necessarily identify with Verdoux, understand why these things happen. Verdoux is a man who worked for over 30 years as a bank clerk only to be fired after the depression. From that point on, he supported his invalid wife and young son by dealing in the aforementioned practices. That Chaplin manages to insert his signature brand of comedy into these situations is commendable; but more astonishing is the way he intellectually grips and ultimately moves the viewer with the experience. From the beginning we know that this story has already occurred (the first shot of the is of Verdoux's gravestone), and the last sequence deals with his trial and execution. Chaplin saved his most brilliant masterstroke for this scene, he gives us a character who has committed several murders, awaits his destiny, but also understands the way the world works, "One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!" he tells a reporter who comes to him looking for a feature with a moral. This is what movies are all about; Monsieur Verdoux blew me away.
