Saving Farce

MONSIEUR VERDOUX continued —

Chaplin-as-Verdoux-as-Varney answers the door to the mailman and indulges in his first bit of farce comedy, pretending his wife is upstairs in her bedroom instead of outside dead in the incinerator. Much of the farce in VERDOUX revolves around money, rather than directly around murder, though the murder is not, as Verdoux seems to think, an insignificant side-issue.

The pseudonym “Varney” implies “vampire,” from the Victorian penny dreadful Chaplin may have remembered, though I don’t know how widely read it was by the time of his birth. It also implies Reg Varney, star of lowbrow seventies sitcom On the Buses, but that one’s definitely an anachronism.

Farce is all about the terror of being FOUND OUT, and Verdoux has a lot to keep secret. His methods of collecting his late wife’s savings are treated with Lubitschian lightness — there’s a delight in showing the whole of his journey up and down stairs, in a pedantic, pre-nouvelle vague way. Richard Lester has talked about the difficulty of doing farce on film, because as soon as you start to cut, the audience forgets which door they’re supposed to be watching. The solution may be to cut less often, which may also be why there are more good farces in pre-nouvelle vague cinema than after, and why rather visually primitive TV shows like Fawlty Towers and Father Ted could do farce with an adroitness denied the makers of LOOT, HOTEL PARADISO and ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE.

Chaplin’s counting of the money is a gag that looks like one of his silent-era undercranking tricks, but isn’t. CC has really trained himself to riffle through banknotes at superhuman speed. Verdoux is an ex-bank clerk, but even if he weren’t, this skilled efficiency is appropriate to a man who has coldbloodedly made homicide his business, and is going about it all very professionally. The difference between Chaplin and a real bank clerk is that he doesn’t have to actually keep count, he just has to look as if he is. So as long as his fingers are moving very fast and the banknotes seem to be getting got through by this process, he’s perfectly convincing as well as impressive.

The busy-ness of Verdoux’s business recalls Adenoid Heinkel, rushing from artist’s studio to office. Heinkel too played the piano, and there as here the reference seemed to be to Nero. Verdoux’s ability to entertain himself at the piano while putting through a call which will make use of the money he’s defrauded from his latest victim makes him more inhuman, not less. But it elevates the mood.

I really, really like the piano gag — a knock at the door confuses Verdoux, who thinks something has shaken loose inside the pianoforte. It’s an audio joke of the kind CITY LIGHTS is so full of, it’s the perfect sound film development of the visual gag (see also Tati) and I wish there was more of this kind of thing in the film.

The newcomer is a woman to clean up the house for resale, and she’s played by Christine Ell. Mysteriously, this is her only film. Chaplin must have liked her face, which is indeed wonderfully characterful.

After setting all this in motion, Chaplin cuts away to the police station, where the terrible Couvais family are reporting their relative’s disappearance, and we learn that the police are already becoming aware of Verdoux’s existence, even though they don’t know his identity…

This is useful exposition — the cops established here will play a role later — but more importantly it generates suspense, because all farces are, essentially, thrillers. They have the same sort of moving parts, but move them faster. And, as a tale of murder and theft, MONSIEUR VERDOUX’s farcical elements are far closer to the crime film than is usual.

This cutaway also allows Chaplin to ellipse-elapse some time, so that when we rejoin him he has the house up for sale. He immediately tries to seduce the prospective buyer, Mme. Marie Grosnay (Isobel Elsom). A sensible woman, she’s understandably creeped out by his rapid advances. Verdoux’s ongoing pursuit of this perfectly sympathetic character will be a second suspense motor powering the later part of the film.

Hitchcock-fashion, Chaplin has us unwillingly root for Verdoux to escape justice, some of the time. But he never makes the moral mistake of having us root for Verdoux to successfully kill. That stuff requires careful handling, and it gets it, even though we can still find fault with some of the choices. Instead, Verdoux’ homicidal plans create suspenseful fear on behalf of his prey, the appealing Mme. Grosnay and the awful, yet perversely likable, Annabella, played by Martha Raye.

Fiona notes that the dressmaker’s dummy establishes the unseen late Mme. Varney/Mademoiselle Couvais as a large woman. “Well, he had to run the incinerator for three days,” I reply.

Verdoux (above left) toys “seductively” with a flower, tickling his chin in EXACTLY the same way he does at the end of CITY LIGHTS, but the effect is decidedly different. His overeager gaucherie in launching himself so wildly at Marie Grosney suggests he’s not as efficient at this as we first thought — the idea of Verdoux as a somewhat inept Bluebeard is not pursued elsewhere.

Verdoux, in an excess of emotion, falls out of a window. Chaplin may have seized on a more verbal form than DICTATOR’s combination of slapstick and dialogue, possibly because he didn’t feel like falling down so much, but his tennis practice has kept him spry and he can still do it.

Does this betray a slight overanxiousness on Chaplin’s as well as Verdoux’s part, a need to reassure us that however “sophisticated” the drawing-room farce gets, there will still be pratfalls?

At any rate, Verdoux doesn’t score, and probably a good thing for him, because shouldn’t he be abandoning the Varney persona, to minimise the chance of his various crimes being connected by the police?

Chaplin finishes the sequence with his first use of a shot of locomotive wheels which will become extremely familiar as the film progresses…

TBC

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