After revisiting the other three Chaplin Criterions this past weekend, I sailed on my wave of enthusiasm and purchased Monsieur Verdoux today so that I could move it to the top of the Blu-ray stack and watch it this evening.
[Show spoiler]Even now, in 2013, it is easy to understand how the 1947 Charlie Chaplin film, Monsieur Verdoux, was the target of considerable negativity and contempt at the time of its release. For the masses of toughened Americans, those whom Tom Brokaw would later describe as the "Greatest Generation", who had weathered the Great Depression and were starting to make a life for themselves and their families after their horrific sacrifices during the second World War, the story of a murderous and opportunistic sociopath who is arrested for the murders of multiple middle-aged women only to imply in court that his wrongdoings pale in comparison to the violence endorsed by wars and economy must have struck many a nerve beneath the skin. Since I was a 1980s kid through and through, my first thought after watching Monsieur Verdoux was to remember a song, "Shoplifters of the World Unite", by The Smiths, where Morrissey, in all his bratty glory, sings, "My only weakness is a listed crime, but last night the plans of a future war was all I saw on Channel Four."
The Southern conservative in me who grew up attending church and believing that we are all individually responsible for all of our responses to other persons and events bristles at the shady and evasive morality of Chaplin's title character in Monsieur Verdoux, but I also cannot help but admire Chaplin's ability to arouse my sympathy, my laughter, and my curiosity for this character. Monsieur Verdoux is an unforgettable work of cinema that pulls us in by way of brilliant pacing and an effective mix of physical and situational comedy, only to leave us standing in the dust shaking our heads with bewilderment at what we have just watched.
Make no mistake about it. Monsieur Verdoux, a black-and-white 1947 film featuring a dapper Charlie Chaplin years past his cinematic prime is still a thousand times more subversive than, say for example, Oliver Stone's 1994 film, Natural Born Killers, or Harmony Korine's 2013 film, Spring Breakers.
Monsieur Verdoux does not entirely turn its back on the strengths of Charlie Chaplin's cinematic past, though, and prospective viewers should be assured that this movie has more than its share of hilariously fun moments. A scene where Charlie Chaplin, in the guise of one of his aliases, is attempting to perform a murder on a small fishing boat in the middle of a lake had me laughing out loud. A later sequence where Chaplin is evading a certain wedding guest, is one of the most brilliantly filmed situational comedy bits that I have ever seen. These lighthearted scenes that actually cause us to cheer for the title character despite our distaste for his life choices are occasionally interrupted by moments of bracing emotion. Monsieur Verdoux's mid-film encounter with a down-on-her-luck girl, played by the unbelievably beautiful Marilyn Nash, stops us dead in our tracks and gives us a view of Verdoux's psyche from a new angle altogether.
Monsieur Verdoux is what he is, and, in the end, we realize that even the most fearsomely remorseless people in our world have unacknowledged sides to their nature and that even these people are not incapable of kindness or altruism on occasion. Charlie Chaplin never asks us to let his character off the hook, because his character ultimately does not deserve to be let off the hook, but he does invite us to observe and understand. At a time when Chaplin himself was besieged by accusations about his character and about his political loyalties, his use of a character like Monsieur Verdoux to demand our understanding was a brave cinematic move.
This unnerving, but amusing film looks great in high definition on this Criterion Blu-ray presentation. The audio presentation comes through nicely for Charlie Chaplin's first honest-to-goodness talking picture where he grants us no shortage of witty dialogue. A handful of fun and informative documentaries shed light on the mystique behind this strange little addition to Chaplin's catalogue.
The Criterion Collection is at its best when it presents controversial films like Monsieur Verdoux and gives a second chance to movies that would otherwise be condemned to wither in the neglected underbelly of movie history. Monsieur Verdoux, in all its hilarious, gripping, beautifully-paced, unsettling, and shady glory, is a movie that deserves to be seen and judged by new generations of viewers.
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