MONSIEUR VERDOUX is, to me, a deeply imperfect film. But it contains moments of truly rare perfection, and the ending is one of them, so it has a claim to greatness.
Verdoux is a man of contradictions. There are (at least) two ways you can feel about contradictory characters — you can feel they’re true to the complexity of life, or you can feel the writer hasn’t done his/her job of rendering the character and their motivations coherent to the audience. Look at Travis Bickle — the bits of him that are like Paul Schrader tend to clash somewhat with the bits that are like would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, based on his diary. The sane and insane bits clash, and the character motivation is all over the place. Schrader says that when actors complain that a character has contradictions, he says “You work it out.”
The decision to make a comedy based on the criminal career of Henri Désiré Landru makes sense mainly in the third act — Landru turned his trial into a farce, was contemptuous and somewhat witty in the dock, as is Henri Verdoux. But while it’s easy to see Landru’s attitude to the law as being in keeping with his prior behaviour, Verdoux’s attitude is harder to square with what we’ve been told about him.
Is this the man who described himself as having awoken from a nightmare? Now, it seems, the nightmare wasn’t so bad after all, since in the face of man’s inhumanity to man, nothing a single person does can be of any significance. It’s not really a good argument, but it sounds convincing, and Sergio Leone says he consciously used it as the basis for THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY. I would say that in a sense, Leone has made better use of the argument, because his film SHOWS it in operation. The mass killing is right up there on the screen, as are the petty private murders, and the final confrontation occurs symbolically at the centre of a huge military cemetery. Chaplin’s film can only take this as a theme when Verdoux EXPOUNDS it. Outside of the newspaper montages, the theme of the rottenness of civilisation is only delivered via speeches.
Similarly — and I wish I could remember who was talking about this — some major French critic of the past — Bazin? — the theme that was profiteering is profitable is, though obvious, worth expressing, but here it’s only done in words, supported by a costume change and the actors.
However, the words in the third act of MV are the best of the film, by some distance. Admittedly, Chaplin as writer has obviously laboured over each utterance, so that his anti-hero suddenly speaks in epigrams and monologues, and admittedly, the man who was reluctantly driven to murder by an unfeeling world has suddenly vanished, replaced by one who has embraced uxoricide as a trivial and ultimately quite defensible crime…
“You have before you a cruel and cynical monster. Look at him!” The prosecutor speaks, and everyone looks at the mild-mannered middle-aged ex-bank clerk in the dock. He looks around himself, as if the cruel and cynical monster must be somebody close by. First laugh of the sequence, and a good one.
When Verdoux makes a crack about shortly losing his head, Chaplin boldly wipes out the potential laugh by cutting to Marilyn Nash as The Girl and her pained reaction. And from this point on, the film refuses to be amusing, although there is a certain jet-black strain of wit underlying everything Verdoux proceeds to say and do.
Asides from Chabrol’s film LANDRU, which is decent, another relevant movie might be Sacha Guitry’s LA POISON from 1951, just a few years after this, in which Michel Simon kills just the one wife and likewise turns the subsequent trial into a circus. Guitry, unlike Chaplin, seems to genuinely be in favour of this murder. I take Chaplin’s logic to be slightly different from his character’s — Verdoux’ behaviour seems monstrous, but it’s not that different from society’s — therefore society should change. If we all behave like nation-states do, everything gets worse. We should hold governments to the same moral standards we expect citizens to follow.
Train wheels and a newspaper are interpolated between the summing-up and the verdict, as if this was all part of one big mechanical process. The train is particularly abstract here — WHO is traveling WHERE? There’s a sort of Ed Wood magisterial abandon (a phrase originally applied by I think Derek Malcolm to Dusan Makavajev’s WR) to this bit of recurring stock footage.
Verdoux gets his say, and it’s the most chilling thing in the film. Rather than plead for mercy, he seems determined to creep everyone out so they’ll execute him just so they can sleep peacefully.
The prosecutor has said that Verdoux could and should have made an honest living. Verdoux says he tried, but nobody would pay him. We don’t have any reason to doubt him here, although starvation was and is relatively uncommon in France, so Verdoux hasn’t been killing to preserve his life and that of his family, but merely to save them from poverty. Poverty is bad enough, and Chaplin had experienced it. But the only way to justify murder as an escape from poverty is to say that your comfort and happiness, and that of your dependents, is more important than other people’s. This seems to me obviously wrong as a matter of ethics, but pretty much all of us feel more strongly about the suffering of our families than we do about the pain of abstracted others.
We define murder as the killing of another person when it cannot be defended as necessary.
This brings to mind another VERDOUX companion piece, Costa-Gavras’ magnificent, underrated and underseen LE COUPERET, based on The Ax by Donald Westlake. Following deadly capitalist logic, a man starts assassinating the small group of people who are his competitors in a highly specialized job market. He’s killing in order to preserve his family’s bourgeoise standard of living, much like Verdoux. Even though his actions are drastically out of proportion to the seriousness of his problem, he’s uncomfortably sympathetic. We know he’s in the wrong, but his moral logic seems perfectly in step with the way the world around him behaves…
“As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it?” I must say, one thing I really appreciate is the brevity of Verdoux’s statement. Maybe CC was conscious of the criticism of the big speech in THE GREAT DICTATOR (which I think is justifiable). By breaking up Verdoux’ final statements into a series of scenes, Chaplin preserves momentum and achieves a satisfying variety. And every line is killer.
“As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison […] I shall see you all, very soon… very soon.”
Chaplin also restrains himself from delivering the last two words right at us, which would certainly have been effective.
A little bit of comic business with the press. “No pictures!” yells the prison guard, and press photographer Wallace Scott, a kind of sub-McHugh type, wipes a fleck of spit from his eye. A very Chaplin bit of business. Scott made his film debut in 1912 and the following year appeared as Rizzio in MARY STUART, another film with a title character who gets the chop. In 1948, the busy character man also has a bit part in IVY, another spouse-killer’s story.
We then see an interview with a cynical news hack, and then film’s most painterly composition. It makes me think of David’s The Death of Marat, although the resemblance is pretty faint. But there is a neoclassical quality here.
Verdoux defines good and evil as arbitrary forces, and remarks, enigmatically, that “Too much of either will destroy us all.” But he doesn’t explain this, and moments later he’s speaking wistfully of Good as something we’ve never had enough of. Chaplin’s big speeches tend to see him stepping out of character in order to tell us what he, Chaplin, really thinks, so this may be an example — Verdoux sees no meaningful distinction between good and evil, but Chaplin does. The other great comedy egoist who feels the need to sometimes drop his persona is Jerry Lewis. Nobody else does this, do they?
“Numbers sanctify, my good fellow.” The classical composition is thrown off by a jarring Dutch tilt of a guard’s face appearing at the Judas Window. The stronger the underlying material, the stronger everything else tends to become, and Chaplin’s best writing seems to bring out his most expressive filmmaking.
Fritz Leiber as the priest — the father of the eminent sci-fi writer, and a prolific character man whose chiseled face was his fortune.
“May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“Why not? After all, it belongs to him.”
Asides from Chaplin’s tendency to turn to face us each time he has a good line, which seems a little like actorly preening, this is a good little scene. And Chaplin the atheist avoids making Verdoux seem too like himself here. Verdoux seems to believe in a deity but finds him so mysterious in his operations that we can’t draw any meaningful conclusions about what He expects from us. To Verdoux, it’s quite possible that God put him on earth to kill a bunch of innocent women. After all, he was permitted to do so. If God hadn’t wanted that, He could have prevented it, couldn’t He?
“I’ve never tasted rum.” This is rather lovely. It wasn’t on his bucket list or anything, but so long as it’s offered, it would be wrong to pass up a new experience, especially when it’s to be your second-last.
The opening of the cell door casts a positively HEAVENLY bright light on Verdoux who, dressed as he is in his shirtsleeves (and the other parts of a shirt — what an odd expression), GLOWS.
As the handcuffs are fastened, Verdoux draws a deep, satisfying breath, and lets it out. His blissed-out expression in doing this conveys a sense of FREEDOM which is in wondrous contrast to the situation. Of course, after the chaining comes the chopping, so Verdoux is indeed about to be free. It would be fantastic to face death that way, to see it as the end of all one’s problems. I have a hard time seeing it that way, but maybe that’s because I’m not properly old yet.
Scorsese brilliantly analyses the final shot in terms of the return of the Last Walk of the Little Fellow, the small steps, the hobbling walk. In fact it’s the same walk we saw from Verdoux since his finances were wiped out family perished so suspiciously. Although, in intervening scenes, he’s moved gracefully and even rapidly, so this is another example of Chaplinesque inconsistency. (The Tramp and Heinkel are always absolutely themselves, even though The Tramp transforms from film to film. The Jewish barber is sometimes Chaplin himself, and I suspect we may see some of the same inconsistency in LIMELIGHT and A KING IN NEW YORK.
Chaplin’s score rises to a glorious crescendo — but what is the precise nature of this Glory?
It is The End.
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