Monsieur Verdoux (1947) - film review

For thirty years, Frenchman Henri Verdoux has endured the monotonous life of a bank clerk so that he can provide for the wife and child he adores.  Then the world’s stock markets collapse and Verdoux’s cosy little world evaporates amid the trauma of a worldwide depression. Unable to find work, the enterprising Monsieur Verdoux decides that murder may turn out to be a profitable venture.  He begins to make a career of marrying old women and then killing them for their money.  The scheme works well enough at first.  By choosing his victims carefully, Verdoux manages to secure a steady income for himself and it appears that nothing can go wrong.  But it does.  Not all of his wives are so easily dispatched, and the family of one of his victims is determined to bring him to book...

Monsieur Verdoux is Charles Chaplin’s most maligned and most consistently underrated film, which is paradoxical since it clearly shows the actor-director at his most polished and versatile.  Not only is the film one of Chaplin’s most sophisticated, in terms of narrative style and cinematic technique, it is also the film in which Chaplin makes his most virulent attack on contemporary society.  The darkest of Chaplin’s comedies, Monsieur Verdoux shocked American audiences when it was first released, and not without reason.

The idea for the film came from Orson Welles, who had intended to make a drama documentary on the life of the infamous French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, who was executed in 1922 for the murder of 10 women and one child.  Chaplin was unwilling to play the lead in a full-length film under another director but saw merit in the concept.  Over a four year period, he developed a black comedic treatment of the Landru story, and this became the screenplay for Monsieur Verdoux.

Escalating production costs and scarcity of film in the immediate aftermath of WWII meant that Chaplin had to forego his usual technique of improvisation and experimentation.  For the first time, he worked from a complete script and meticulously planned shooting schedule, supplemented by carefully worked out sketches to minimise the time taken to set up and shoot each scene.  As a consequence, Monsieur Verdoux was the Chaplin feature film with the shortest shooting time, just under three months.  Chaplin was keen to achieve an authentic French look for the sets and, to that end, he engaged the well-known French filmmaker Robert Florey to work as his associate director.

Monsieur Verdoux courted controversy from the moment it was released, being provocative on two counts.  First, Chaplin portrays the serial killer Verdoux not as a villain but as a highly sympathetic individual, an amoral character who sincerely believes that the taking of human life is not immoral if it is undertaken for purely commercial reasons.  Verdoux is the victim of an unsympathetic world in which he is right and everyone else is wrong (or at least unwilling to accept the truth).   The final scene in which Verdoux is led off to the guillotine immediately calls to mind the final shots of Chaplin’s previous films in which the Tramp, his most famous character, walks off into the distance.  Chaplin is compelling us to empathise with a man who has killed a dozen women for profit.

More contentious was Chaplin’s attempt to make some kind of moral equivalence between Verdoux’s exploits and the mass murder that is routinely practised in warfare.  "One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify," Verdoux boldly states in his defence.  Even today, these words have a chilling resonance; imagine how keenly they were felt, particularly by their author, in the year after the Americans dropped atom bombs on Japan.  It was hard for a man of Chaplin’s intellect and sensibility not to be cynical in the face of this gruesome reality.  But, at a time when America was slipping into Cold War paranoia, it was a dangerous sentiment to air.  

The critical and public reaction to Monsieur Verdoux in the United States on its first release was overwhelmingly negative.  The film earned Chaplin the reputation of a Communist sympathiser and he would become the most high profile victim of the anti-Communist onslaught on Hollywood in the late 1940s, early 1950s.  The experience would sour Chaplin’s relationship with the US and, when he went off to England in 1952 to attend the London premiere of his next film, Limelight, he was denied reentry into the country.  He did not return to the United States until 1972.

Whilst Monsieur Verdoux was an unmitigated flop in America, it was, however, very successful in Europe. Today, opinion remains divided over how the film compares with Chaplin’s other great films.  It certainly lacks the overt slapstick of the director’s more popular works and is altogether a different kind of film.  What we see here is a darker, far more cynical Chaplin than is visible in any of his earlier films, but should the change from Charlot to Verdoux surprise us?  It was after all Chaplin who famously remarked that tragedy and comedy are really the same thing, just viewed from two different perspectives.  No film demonstrates this notion of duality more forcefully than Monsieur Verdoux, the first film that Chaplin made once nuclear Armageddon had become a distinct possibility, if not the inevitable fate for mankind.

© James Travers 2009

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