OK, so it’s 1946 and you are the most famous film comedian in the world. In terms of publicity, you have had your ups and downs, especially in recent years. There have been divorces, eyebrow-raising rumors of affairs, and lately a messy paternity suit. (Blood test evidence has proved conclusively that you couldn’t be the father, but it wasn’t yet admissible in California courts at that time and you lost the case.) Politically, you’ve caused some eyebrow-raising too. The FBI, then led by the Communist-hunting closet queen J. Edgar Hoover, has put its political suspicions together with the paternity case to generate an attempted federal prosecution of you under the Mann Act, which fails in court but makes hay in the gossip columns. None of this helps your film output, so prolific in the silent days, which had already slowed to a trickle with the coming of sound, while your films have increasingly contained passages that got on the nerves of some group or other: Your final speech in The Great Dictator (1940) provoked a lot of winces along with the bravos. If you had still been alive in 2020, you wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Trump and other Republicans using the term “socialist” as a smear-word.
So now it’s 1946. The world’s been through hell and it’s only shakily beginning to recover and to figure out what comes next. The gigantic twin terrors of the recent past, the revelation of the Holocaust and the devastation of two Japanese cities by atomic weapons, have left everyone reeling or numb with shock. What will the world’s most beloved maker of film comedies do next that might conceivably address the situation?
You make what in retrospect, 74 years later, still seems the most improbable choice imaginable: You will create a comedy in which you play a serial killer of women. With the thousands of corpses in the Nazi death camps fresh in everyone’s mind and with the world horrorstruck over Hiroshima, you, who not long ago, at age 54, have made many more headlines by marrying the 18-year-old daughter of America’s greatest living playwright (who has noisily cut off all communication with her as a result), will reanimate in fictional form the career of Henri-Desire Landru (1869-1922), one of the early 20th century’s leading practitioners of what the journalist William Bolitho called “murder for profit.” You chose it. You made the film. You probably figured that some trouble would result, but after all, in 1946 you are still the world’s most beloved film comedian, marital scandals and political travails notwithstanding. Maybe you thought you could get away with it.
And, in a sense, Charlie Chaplin did get away with it. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) is a masterpiece—probably the most problematic, disquieting, unsatisfactory masterpiece ever created on film, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Since the hostile reception of its initial release, which aroused a malice and legal threats that ended by driving Chaplin into permanent exile from the U.S., it has been reissued, reassessed, reconsidered, and firmly established as one of the films you can’t do without. Even if watching it gives you the cold shudders at moments, its mastery, like its daring, is undeniable. Once seen, it is impossible to shake. Its outrageous juxtapositions of brilliant slapstick with unnervingly ironic dark comedy, harsh social comment, and a kind of stark bluntness leave it unresolved in a way that keeps coming back in one’s mind. It doesn’t wholly make sense, aesthetically or psychologically, yet in 2021, after the four years the world has just been through, its perpetually puzzling lack of cohesion seems to make more sense than ever. Chaplin’s not crazy: It’s just that our world’s crazy and Chaplin lived in it. Everything else that’s “wrong” with Monsieur Verdoux, like everything that’s right with it, comes from his having been Chaplin. Hand the world’s most famous film comedian the first half of the 20th century to mull over, and this is what you get.
The idea for the film began with Orson Welles, who pitched it to Chaplin and gets an onscreen credit for having done so. Welles’s initial notion seems to have been that he would direct, and Chaplin would star in, a film based much more closely on the facts of Landru’s actual case. One can easily see why this proposal did not suit Chaplin, on two grounds: He was by then long used to having his own way about every detail of his movies; and the story of the real-life Landru, a habitual criminal who had served multiple jail terms for various kinds of fraud and swindling long before he took up wife-murder as a profession, did not at all convey the moral Chaplin wished his film to draw. He did take some details from Landru’s actual life, including his fastidiousness, his cultivation of roses, and his pose as a furniture dealer, a trade in which Landru had briefly been involved.
Beyond that, Chaplin’s imagination roamed free. His serial killer is a pen-pushing drudge (the name “Verdoux” means “sweet worm” in French), a little guy who has held the same lowly job as a bank teller for 30 years, until he is sacked when the Depression hits. With a wheelchair-bound wife and a child to support, he turns to his life of crime, finding affluent widows or spinsters whom he courts (under fake identities), marries, and then murders for their assets. When finally caught, he defends himself by declaring that he was only doing on a small scale what the big financial interests do on a global one. “As a mass killer,” he tells the court, “I’m an amateur” by comparison. Like many things in the film, this half-articulated argument is both true and not true. The notion that all big business is a conspiracy to kill off ordinary people, especially women and children, was an aspect of the film that provoked the highest outrage in the US when it was released; Europeans were more sanguine on the subject, and some of the things said by Republican officials during the current pandemic have been sharp reminders of how close to the discomfiting truth Chaplin’s generalizations were.
Interestingly, what we see of Verdoux’s methods in the course of the film rather belies his assertion. In murder, despite his disclaimer, his procedures are quite meticulously professional and efficient (though like all murderers, he meets plenty of unexpected obstacles and setbacks). It is in finance—in investing his ill-gotten gains—that he proves himself an amateur, constantly buying on margin so that every market downturn puts him in danger of being wiped out. In the one big domestic scene with his family, at the movie’s center, he celebrates his wedding anniversary by ceremoniously presenting his wife (Mady Correll) with the deed to their house, saying, “Now no one can take this away from you.” But somewhat later we learn that the house is still in mortgage, and a market crash forces the bank to foreclose. In a scene shortly after that, Verdoux simply says that he has lost his wife and child, with no explanation of how this came to pass or what it might have to do with the mortgage. (In the anniversary scene, in fact, his wife talks about how much happier they were living in a one-room flat, when he was home all the time and not off doing “business.”)
Six women have significant roles in the film. In addition to Verdoux’s wife, there is a young girl (Marilyn Nash), whom the Production Code prevented Chaplin from explicitly showing to be a streetwalker, though that is obviously what she is up to. She is starving and has just gotten out of jail. He takes her home and feeds her, meaning to try out on her a new poison he has just acquired, but changes his mind when he learns that she, like him, has loved someone crippled (her recently dead husband, a Belgian war veteran). She is the only woman to whom we see him doing good, and their several later encounters grow eerier and eerier as her life’s trajectory becomes the opposite of his. (She becomes the mistress of a wealthy munitions manufacturer. “That’s the business I should have gone into,” he says.)
Sidebar: The story of the new poison that Verdoux doesn’t test on the girl contains several of the movie’s more deeply buried ironies: A pharmacist (Robert Lewis) who seems to be Verdoux’ only family friend in the country tells him about it during the anniversary dinner. And Verdoux ends up not using it on any of his prospective female victims; its only recipient is a male—the police inspector (Charles Evans) who has come to arrest him. While many in the cast of Monsieur Verdoux went on to less than notable careers, Lewis went from its filming directly back to fame and fortune in New York, as director of a succession of Broadway shows starting with Brigadoon (1947) and as a co-founder of the Actors Studio with Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan.
And then there are the four women whom Verdoux actually murders or plots to murder in the course of the film. Their contrasting presences make up a kind of subterranean structural principle, so striking that I have often wondered to what extent Chaplin was consciously aware of it—art is never entirely a conscious process—and I don’t recall having seen it written about anywhere else. Verdoux, as I said, murders or plans to murder four women in the course of the film. The first is Thelma Couvais, who is already dead when the action begins. All we see of her is a column of black smoke rising from an incinerator, though we get some idea of her less than appealing character from the unpleasant scene of her family—shot and performed like a slapstick two-reeler or a vaudeville sketch—that begins the picture. Next there is Lydia (Margaret Hoffman), a suspicious, dried-up spinster who is the only woman Verdoux murders during the picture. Time and money—Verdoux must persuade her to draw her savings out of the bank before it closes—are the substance of the single episode in which she appears. When she is gone, we never hear of her again.
Next comes the wealthy widow Madame Grosnay (Isobel Elsom), whom Verdoux has met while trying to sell the house in which he lived with Thelma. Madame Grosnay seems to bring out some physical extravagance in Verdoux. He woos her almost frenetically with bouquets of flowers, chases her around a bedroom while showing the house, indulges in elaborate acrobatics when taking tea with her so as not to spill his cup, and finally, when she does agree to marry him, finds himself confronted with a giant social-event wedding crowded with flowers, food, drink, and guests—including one whom he has to keep dodging, so that the wedding finally never comes off.
Most remarkably, there is Annabella (Martha Raye), to whom he is already fraudulently married, under the name of ‘Captain Bonheur.’ Annabella, a sailor’s widow who has won her huge fortune in a lottery, is a whirlwind mass of contradictions, a party animal who seizes on every impulse and changes her mind at a moment’s notice. She will invest in any wacky scheme, and Verdoux at one point risks attracting public attention by creating a scene when she gives a shyster money to invest in a machine for extracting minerals from sea water. Verdoux’s systematic attempts to kill Annabella all get thwarted by preposterous coincidences or turns of fate, each giving some new opportunity for outrageous comedy to Raye, whose joyously excessive performance is usually the thing most people recall first about the film.
Thelma, Lydia, Madame Grosnay, Annabella. The four elements: fire, air, earth, and water. The four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, summer. The four tenses: past, present, future, conditional. Thelma: a past that has literally gone up in smoke, so quickly forgotten that when the real estate agent expresses his condolences, Chaplin gets a grim laugh out of Verdoux’s having to take a second to remember her. And yet it will be the past that comes back to haunt him, when Thelma’s relatives, provincial tourists in Paris, spot him at the Café Royale. Lydia: the urgency of the present moment—he must get her money before the bank closes, or his stock holdings will be wiped out tomorrow. Her death is perhaps the film’s most chilling moment: We hear her crabby voice, summoning him to come to bed, as he stands at the hallway window, waxing poetic about Endymion and the moon. When he goes into the bedroom, the camera holds on the window as we watch the sky change from night to morning. When Verdoux bustles out of the bedroom, in a hurry to phone his stockbroker, we get a glimpse into the nuptial chamber. The bed is freshly made up, as if no one had ever slept there. Lydia, who is never seen or referred to again, has vanished, like the present moment, into thin air.
With Madame Grosnay, Verdoux’s talk is airy—one topic he touches on is astrology—but she seems altogether too earthbound to take it seriously. While with all other women he keeps an austere, almost formal distance—his intimacies with Annabella always seem marked by a faint shudder—but the mere thought of approaching Madame Grosnay turns him uncontrollable. When he comes to call, his enthusiasm makes him embrace the woman who answers the door before he realizes she isn’t his intended victim. The small private wedding he has hoped for explodes into a gigantic fashionable ‘crush,’ like a spring storm in which he is caught up, and from which he barely escapes without a confrontation.
Life is calmer with Annabella, or would be if Verdoux could get Annabella herself to stay steady, but she is a vortex of changeability. Everything with her is fluid, including the methods by which Verdoux attempts to dispose of her, and everything can change from moment to moment. He becomes her fall guy: When he tries to poison her, the glasses somehow get switched and he thinks he has drunk the tainted wine. When he takes her out in a rowboat, meaning to drown her, in the movie’s hilarious comic peak (was Chaplin thinking of von Sternberg’s 1931 film of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy? George Stevens’s later film version, A Place in the Sun, was still four years off), it is he who falls out of the boat and almost drowns.
Verdoux himself is a strange mixture of traits, in much the same way that Chaplin’s sound films are a strange mix of silent-era physical comedy with an almost stagy overemphasis on talk, with its theatricalist blend of verbal gags and big serious speeches. Except for the irrepressible Martha Raye, everything in Monsieur Verdoux is slightly artificial, “distanced” not in a Brechtian sense but in a slightly stilted, formalized way, as if Chaplin had built an imaginary row of footlights to separate the action from us. The cinematic devices—montages of newspaper headlines telling of market disasters and hordes of people out of work, or the maddening train wheels that notate Verdoux’s constant escapes from one identity to another—serve not as means of movie storytelling but as pauses between episodes, as if we were being encouraged to take a moment to peruse the playbill while the curtain was lowered so the stagehands could set up the next scene.
And Verdoux himself is a stagy compendium of traits, the dapper boulevardier with his walking stick and his fastidiously clad, almost effete precision of movement. He certainly does not fit the pattern of the men who took up wife-killing as a source of income in the early 20th century: Landru was a chronic criminal, who had a long rap sheet before he started in on his trade of marrying and murdering. George Joseph Smith (1872-1915), the “brides in the bath” murderer, was, a juvenile delinquent who, like Landru, first became a petty swindler with a long rap sheet. Budapest’s “Lonely Hearts” murderer, Bela Kiss (1877-?1916), began swindling and then murdering the women he preyed upon in his early youth. (A faint echo of his crimes appears in the “Tango Tragique” song in the 1963 Bock-Harnick musical She Loves Me, which is set in Budapest.) What links the three, aside from their having flourished just before and during World War I, is that they lived in a time when marriage, rather than a career, was a woman’s principal goal; women in the middle and upper-middle classes outnumbered men, and many found themselves left with the little money their fathers or first husbands had settled on them, and no one to share their lives with. The class persisted into the era Monsieur Verdoux describes, but to a diminished degree: The shortage of men on the home front in World War I had driven many women into work—and the independence it brought—to a degree which before the War would have been thought “low-class” and less than respectable. The young woman on whom Verdoux elects not to try his deadly experiment represents this new social type.
Like his victims, Verdoux himself, strutting along the Paris boulevards and genteelly raising his hat to potential female targets in cafes, seems something of a throwback, with his correctness of manner, his tendency to hector, gently, those who commit improprieties, and his flights of intellectual fancy (carefully tailored in style and topic to fit each situation). When he is caught and sentenced to death, he lectures the judge, the priest who visits him in the death cell, and the warden leading him to the guillotine, just as suavely as if he were still wooing one of his wife-targets. Only now he is wooing the audience (though still fastidiously, at a distance), setting himself up as it were in competition with the era’s great debaters, like Bernard Shaw. But he lacks Shaw’s dialectical sense, and—though much of what he says is true, in a general way—it provides no justification for his crimes. The young woman, who in their last meeting has tried to convince him that acts of kindness offer a better way of proceeding through life, is there in court, presumably with her munitions manufacturer (whom she says is “very kind and generous” to her), to see him condemned.
In Verdoux’s last scene with this young woman, at the Café Royale, Chaplin provides two intriguing clues. Verdoux has lost all his money and is walking aimlessly along the street when she recognizes him (the second time she has done so) and calls out to him from the comfortable taxi in which she is riding. (He is so heedless of where he walks that the car almost runs him down.) When he explains that he now cannot afford to feed her, she says, “then let me feed you.” In the Café, he makes the one puzzling statement I cited earlier, about having lost his wife and child “soon after the Crash,” adding, “They are happier where they are.” (One wonders if they too, like Lydia, haven’t conveniently vanished into thin air before the mortage men came to seize the property.)
Then he says something that puts the whole movie into a startling perspective: “I seem to have awakened from a dream.” After losing his bank-clerk job, he explains, “What followed was a numbed confusion. I seemed to be living in a half-dream world—horrible. Now I’ve awakened. Sometimes I wonder if that world ever existed.”
Of course, that world never did exist: It is the fictional world of the movie we have been watching, and the speaker of those lines is the man who dreamed it up. Very far from the sordid actuality of history’s real-life ‘marital’ serial killers, with their weirdnesses and their compulsive petty swindles, it is the world envisioned by a master comedian, sick with revulsion at the crassness and violence of modern life, who wanted to tell a parable in which the Little Tramp, with his innocent lewdness and his infinite resourcefulness, has metamorphosed into the little bank clerk who never gets a break, and whose way of going into business for himself is a small-scale dementia that echoes what he sees as the big global dementia playing out around him. The horrible half-dream world from which Verdoux is struggling to awake is the real world, in which we read or watch the news every day, often to find a story of some other small-scale Verdoux played up as an entertaining feature. Nothing quite like this speech occurs in any other film I can think of (though a few passages in Cocteau’s films come to mind); the closest analogy that occurs to me is in Shakespeare: Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech in The Tempest. No wonder Verdoux displays such eerie calm as he goes toward death. They will cut off his head with a guillotine, but that head, like the hearts of the women he is supposed to have killed, is a purely imaginary and temporary construct. It is not the head of Chaplin—despite the hordes of right-wingers baying for his blood—but the head of this imaginary little guy who tried to go the big world one better.
We know that all film is a dream, which we watch and take back into our “real” world with us, in fragmented form. Nobody summed up the experience better than Chaplin’s great silent-era colleague and rival, Buster Keaton, when in the movie-theater scene of Sherlock Jr. (1924), he showed his projectionist hero falling asleep at the projector, his spirit leaving his body to walk up the theater aisle into the film. What Keaton had crystallized into a silent image, Chaplin, 23 years later, puts into words—his ultimate tribute, one might say, to the art of talking pictures, which he had resisted and toyed with for so long. No wonder so much of Monsieur Verdoux seems “unreal”; reality is not its province but a parallel world with which it transacts. That it occasioned such uproar when it premiered, and still sticks in the world’s craw as a classic, shows you both the cunning and the truth inside Chaplin’s dream.
For Chaplin himself, the reality of America’s initial response to the release of Monsieur Verdoux was a violently rude awakening from that dream. The film had its defenders: Among the most notable were James Agee, who published a multi-part series in praise of it in The Nation, and Eric Bentley, whose knowing encomium appeared in The Kenyon Review. (The two essays can be found in their respective collections, Agee on Film and In Search of Theatre.) Agee, who was one of the few film critics to rebuke his colleagues for their wrath against Chaplin at the notorious New York press conference where the daily press insisted on railing against Chaplin’s politics rather than asking about the film, became a friend of the great comedian as a result; during their correspondence, Agee actually drafted a proposal for a possible film, in which Chaplin would play the Little Tramp as the sole survivor of an atomic war.
But voices like Agee’s and Bentley’s, in left-leaning “little” magazines of the era, were the exception. The prevailing tone in the reviews was shrilly hostile, and the film was a dismal failure at the American box office. (In several areas it was either actively boycotted or banned outright.) Worse was to come: The newspapers’ outcry against Chaplin’s politics was paired with editorial attacks on his morals, as if the Joan Barry paternity suit and Chaplin’s support for our wartime alliance with the Soviet Union were both natural outgrowths of some innately “immoral” character flaw that had led him to portray a serial killer of women. The government, responding to the dual allegations, announced it was opening a further investigation of him; the country where he had lived for 30 years while holding a British passport was making him increasingly unwelcome. He grew depressed; his creative work came to a near-standstill.
Even so, he managed to complete Limelight (1952), a highly personal and largely apolitical film in which he played a washed-up Edwardian music-hall comedian who rescues a young dancer (Claire Bloom) from suicide. American critics were kinder, but 1952 was the height of the HUAC blacklist, and organized boycotts were stronger, guaranteeing the film’s US box-office failure. But by that time, Chaplin had deeper personal concerns. He had elected to give Limelight’s world premiere in London, where it is set. On board the Queen Elizabeth, en route to London for the event, he received a notice from the US government that his re-entry permit had been cancelled; he was now an “undesirable alien.” If he wished to apply for a new entry visa, he would have to submit to an interview regarding his political affiliations and an investigation of his personal affairs. Knowing how closely the Passport Office worked with Hoover’s FBI, and how the latter worked hand in hand with newspaper gossip columnists, Chaplin declined the offer. He would remain in Europe, and not see America again for nearly 20 years. Sending Oona back to Los Angeles to sell off his properties there, he settled in Switzerland, parenting a multitude of children. His two subsequent films, the bitter, lackluster A King in New York (1957), and the sad misfire A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) were made in England, attracting minimal notice over here.
Decades later, Hollywood and the State Department relented to some degree, permitting him to return long enough to accept an honorary Academy Award in 1971. The Oscar audience gave him a 12-minute standing ovation, the longest on record.
Even with this belated amends, the failure of his last films would have been a sorry ending to Chaplin’s career, except that it was not the ending. Starting in the early 1960s, entrepreneurs competed to revive, under Chaplin’s license, his sound-era masterpieces: City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940), along with silent-era gems like The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928). They were kept out of wide release, and the big first-run theaters that showed them were invariably packed. Reediting and rescoring the films, Chaplin husbanded the works he owned carefully, and made a comfortable living from their distribution, proving that he did not need to go into the munitions business after all.
And of all his titles, the one that consistently provoked the most interest, and sparked the most enthusiastic reappraisals, was Monsieur Verdoux. A film that kindles glowing enthusiasm while setting off ferocious arguments both artistic and political, since it was brought back it has never gone away. Until we solve the human problems that brought it into being, it will remain, to haunt us, trouble us, perplex us, as masterpieces so often do.
