Run From Your Wife

Wedding/garden party — appropriate, as we’re dining with friends in their garden (pizza stove!) this evening. Very middle-class.

Verdoux is finally marrying Madame Grosnay — he’s said it with flowers, and now will say it with a ring, followed by uxoricide. This is the scene where, per IMDb, Edna Purviance is supposed to appear (the Inaccurate Movie Database also suggests that she’s in LIMELIGHT too, but we’ll pluck that canard when we come to it. Per David Robinson and Simon Louvish, Chaplin considered casting Edna as Mme. Grosnay, and shot tests (do they survive?) before, by mutual agreement and with mutual relief it seems, the plan was abandoned.

Lots of matronly ladies at the wedding (above), but no obvious Ednas. Would we be sure to recognize her?

But look who does appear: Fred Karno! (Centre, light grey suit)

Well, Fred Karno Jr, though I don’t know how you can be called Junior looking like that (he’s apparently in his fifties). Apparently the son of Chaplin’s mentor/impresario also pops up in THE GOLD RUSH as some dance hall rando. But here he’s introduced by name, so it’s a real homage.

Chaplin for some reason presents us with an array of frontal close-ups of guests — one is Gertrude Astor, former movie queen. The idea seems to be to suggest that Verdoux is overwhelmed by all these faces — he’d wanted a quiet wedding, for understandable reasons, but the darn thing metastasized. The lack of any sign of discomfiture in Verdoux face (his back is to camera immediately after the CUs) kind of prevents the effect coming across.

We now get Keystone farce-comedy, fairly scandalous for the era I guess. The script seems at pains not to confirm Verdoux as being married to Annabella, but he’s clearly already committed bigamy (more distressing to the censor than murder). It would be more delicious to have one of his wives at the wedding, but that’s apparently not allowed. (Chaplin reports considerable back-and-forth with the Breen Office.)

Verdoux backs into Annabella who is backing into him — they apologise without recognising each other, but seconds later, after some would-be-clever dialogue — he hears her rather distinctive laugh, and this time his face is aimed right at us —

Manfully, he resists the traditional spit-take. This is a more refined, garden-party-variety non-spit-take.

Then someone says it’s Madame Bonheur, and Verdoux is in profile so he can spit-take all over his guests.

Verdoux ducks into the summer-house, then sees Annabella Bonheur through the glass and literally ducks. The camera swoops over his back and into a single on Annabella, without breaking the glass (there is none).

Exiting the conservatory as Annabella enters it, Verdoux seeks refuge under a table, where he pretends to M. Karno that he’s looking for a lost sandwich (“Just an ordinary sandwich, a slice of bread between two pieces of meat.”) This puts me in mind of Fernando Rey at the end of DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE. Given Bunuel’s acquaintance with Chaplin, the reference may be intentional.

Very nice composition in depth as Verdoux-Varney makes his getaway — we can see a friend looking out the window he’s just leapt from, the hallway he’s belted back through, the door he’s fled through and the wall he’s vaulting, as well the stair down which Mme Marie Grosnay (Isobel Alsom in place of Edna) has descended to catch a fleeting glimpse of her departing erstwhile groom.

One might reflect that in truth, it is Marie who has had the lucky escape.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Sunday Intertitle: Gamin(e)

The choppy narrative of MODERN TIMES could have worked in Chaplin’s favour when he’s incarcerated for the first time: the story can shift over to introduce our leading lady. Instead, he has himself immediately released, offscreen miracle cure effected — his white-coated shrink (Dr. Kugelschlapp, never to be seen again) whacks him heartily on the back after cautioning him to avoid excitement. Charlie walks out of what looks like a library into a dervish-like montage of Dutch tilts. Finds his way to the docks, and innocently involves himself in a labour protest attacked by police.

This is fascinating for reasons beyond Lumet’s great line — “My God, the execution!” — Chaplin avoids making his character politically aware. He’s just trying to helpfully return a red flag. But the film can be political: a peaceful protest is attacked by cops on horseback. I’m not aware of a great many other films of the thirties which show that kind of action. Even at Warners.

You can argue that Chaplin’s indirect approach — surely a lot of audiences don’t think about the underlying assumptions about cops versus workers here — perhaps robs the commentary of punch. But the fact that it’s even there is remarkable. And doubtless a black mark on Chaplin’s FBI file, though the Feds don’t seem too hot at textual analysis.

This is all just an unusually longterm set-up for a meet cute, since on that same waterfront dwells wild-eyed banana snatcher Paulette Goddard, “the gamin.” The most prominent spelling mistake in cinema.

The whole character is interesting. Edna Purviance may have occasionally played juveniles, but this is the first major Chaplin heroine I can think of explicitly typed as a kid. (Merna, in THE CIRCUS, under her father’s thumb until recued by marriage, is a strong candidate though.) The former Ziegfeld girl was 26, old by Chaplin’s usual standards, but he casts her young to make up for it. The two were dating, but kept their relationship non-specific for the press, since marriage was not in their immediate plans.

Chaplin wrote in his plans for the film that there would be no hint of sex in the screen relationship. Probably wise, given his by now apparent middle-age (a spry forty-seven). But then he introduces his co-star lustily eating a banana, which, given his own must-publicised orality, could be a Freudian signifier or what I’m sure I don’t know.

Paulette, as Chaplin’s first leading lady since Edna to star in more than one movie with him (THE GREAT DICTATOR is next), is a significant figure. She encouraged Chaplin to make re-establish contact with his two sons, Sydney and Charles Jr. Sydney recalled sharing a bed with her until it was noticed the boys were getting a mite too old for that, and the pity of it is their pleas — “Why can’t we sleep with Paulette?” — would, by their very ardency, have made the ban more final.

The gamin has some young siblings — don’t worry, too young even for Chaplin — throwaway sentimentality — they’ll get taken away by the authorities, never to be worried about again. The child welfare people, as in THE KID, are a Dickensian social menace. But the true purpose of these characters, like Monsieur Verdoux’s wife, is to justify the gamin’s criminality. Her father, a listless victim of unemployment, is a micro-nod to the film’s social conscience.

The fact that Charlie is arrested by the docks and bundled into a police wagon suggests to me that Chaplin may have intended the tramp and the gamin to meet up immediately after his initial arrest. But instead we now get a whole prison sequence, leaving Paulette’s introduction lying there, not so much a plot thread as an off-cut, waiting to be picked up later.

So now we’re off to jail…

Meaningful Beauty

Rounding off my WOMAN OF PARIS coverage as it seems important to get to THE GOLD RUSH for the holiday season. It’s a snowy, festive film.

I’ll tell you who’s good in AWOP — Nellie Bly Baker, the secretary at the Chaplin Studio, who plays a masseuse. Chaplin apparently knew she could mimic him well enough to do the role. He just cuts to her nearly impassive face as Edna is getting a rubdown and discussing her love life with friends. Silent condemnation from La Baker, her eyes deliberately unseeing. Marvelously understated — it’s only the regularity of the cutaways that makes her attitude very clear indeed.

So, although I don’t hugely love the movie, I’m massively impressed by the storytelling. Like the way a shirt cuff, dropped from a drawer, reveals to Carl Miller’s character the fact that Edna has a lover. A very Lubitschian conceit.

Again, against the elegance of the narration is the corniness of the story. Edna’s struggle to choose between love and luxury implies a sophistication that is belied by the third act melodrama: Miller at first seems set to murder Menjou, then shoots himself. His mother takes the gun and sets off to kill Edna. At this point, improbabilities have piled up past the point I can take them seriously. And then Edna and mom bury the hatchet and go off to do good works.

Chaplin, according to David Robinson, came to work one day all excited about his solution to the story: the two women would go work in a leper colony. This notion was greeted with revulsion by his team, and Chaplin stormed off, taking several days away from the studio. When he returned, the incident was never mentioned. So instead out heroine and her former foe are running an orphanage, still a sentimental solution but less grotesque. One wonders about entrusting Lydia Knott’s mom character with more kids, she didn’t do so well with her son.

Chaplin also planned a meeting between Menjou and Purviance’s characters, but had a happier inspiration in the end: they pass by, oblivious of one another, she hitching a ride on a cart with a band of musicians, he riding in a limo with a crony. The guys asks, apropos of nothing, “By the way, whatever happened to Marie St. Clair?” Menjou gives an indifferent shrug. And at that moment, illustrating neatly the idea of fate Chaplin hints at in the film’s sub-title, the paths cross.

But there’s more. Chaplin pays particular close attention to the musicians Edna is riding with, just as he had to Nellie Bly Baker earlier. The three distinct cutaways to the singer and accordionist carry some poetic meaning, just out of reach of the rational brain. They have nothing to do with anything that’s happening, and we don’t know what they’re singing. And I think it’s their irrelevance that makes them poetic. They’re life, and they’re going on without regard to the melodrama that has just fizzled out.

I would like to suggest that the strange, medievalesque pilgrim troupe that pass by at the end of Fellini’s IL BIDONE, and the strolling players who join paths with Masina at the end of his NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, derive directly from this moment. We know Fellini took a lot of inspiration from Chaplin.

The peculiar time-warped troupe of IL BIDONE provoked a battle between Fellini and his producer. An assistant was asked his opinion. He said they should keep them in the picture, as the scene had beauty. To his surprise, Fellini rejected this argument. No, he said. It had MEANINGFUL BEAUTY.