Wheeler Dealer

Starting LIMELIGHT with Calvero drunk, so that Chaplin can do his celebrated inebriate act, is an odd choice in a way, because LIMELIGHT is not a comedy. Like A WOMAN OF PARIS, his last serious film, it has comic elements, but it’s at heart a melodrama, and setting it up as such would seem to be its most important task.

But Claire Bloom is attempting suicide by overdose AND gassing, so that side of things is fairly well represented. The uncomfortable humour of her rescuer being pie-eyed is useful because it establishes that there WILL be some comedy, although in fact almost all the comedy we get will be stage performances. In their long philosophical conversations, Calvero and Thereza will mostly play it straight, and the supporting cast don’t get a lot of humour either. Thereza will laugh at Calvero’s funny business, but doesn’t attempt to make him laugh — her only humour comes when she’s with young Sydney Chaplin as the composer, which suggests to me that Calvero is right to see them as a better match than Thereza with himself.

Another family member enters the story — Wheeler Dryden, Chaplin’s less well-known half-brother (less well-known than the talented but horrifying Syd). I’ve seen WD in a silent short at Bologna and found him to be an appalling actor. He’s OK here. He has no real emotions, though, so it’s good that he’s playing a strictly professional medical man.

(To fairly assess Chaplin’s limitations as a writer and director of talking picture drama, one could contrast the scene of Thereza’s overdose with the similar sequence in THE APARTMENT, which is both delicate — Billy Wilder frames the sleeping pills as a reflection in the shaving mirror rather than show them directly — and raw — slapping and puking — mostly offscreen but inescapable — and his doctor is both professional AND passionately moral.)

Dryden was very effective as a radio voice-over in THE GREAT DICTATOR — again, a role without human emotion — but this is his first onscreen role for his half-brother. (WRONG — see comments) I can’t see him as the kind of performer Chaplin would have admired, were it not for the familial relationship. But, on the other hand, apart from his oft-stated commitment to emotional truth, Chaplin also required his players to be technicians who could mimic the way HE played out a scene. Claire Bloom, completely inexperienced as a film actor, was absolutely relieved to find that Chaplin intended to act her part himself, and all she had to do was copy him. This means any inadequacies we find in her perf can be laid squarely at Chaplin’s door.

Bloom liked his leading ladies young, and he liked them inexperienced — virginal, we might say. MONSIEUR VERDOUX was atypical in that Martha Raye was an experienced comic. But she wasn’t the romantic lead, the ingenue Marilyn Nash was, even though Raye has more of a sex relationship with Verdoux than “the Girl” does.

Chaplin had been becoming more and more careful about the amount of romance he allowed himself onscreen. In THE GOLD RUSH, the Little Fellow doesn’t achieve an actual romantic relationship until the final shot, and in CITY LIGHTS it’s all subterfuge and mistaken identity and in the final shot it’s not at all clear than the logical next step will be a romance. MODERN TIMES offers a fantasy and then a brief reality of domesticity with a very young girl, but it’s sexless — “insipid,” one female viewer just called it on Twitter. But would be comfortable with it being any more, ah, sipid, than it is?

THE GREAT DICTATOR has Hynkel showing brief lustful passions when he can be bothered, while the Jewish barber has none, his tentative love affair with Hannah seeming entirely chaste.

One thing about Calvero — he has a much deeper, throatier, more masculine voice than any previous Chaplin character with an audible voice. The Jewish barber is almost fluting in tone, his voice nervously up until he makes the big speech at the end and drops an octave or so, as he drops the disguise and becomes Chaplin. Hynkel is slightly deeper and so is Verdoux, but not by much. The light comedy Chaplin is going for seems to provoke from him lighter voices (TGD may not seem light, but there’s a Lubitchian comic-opera airiness to the playing, with throwaway line readings — “Far from perfect” — which contrasts thrillingly with the darkness of the subject.

Calvero, we could say, is Chaplin’s most butch character.

The most surprising gag in this sequence is when Calvero smells gas, and checks first his cheap cigar, then the sole of his shoe. A dogshit joke in a Chaplin film… this is a first, but it’s in keeping with the peeing baby gags from much earlier in his work. Chaplin is not averse to vulgarity if it can be achieved in a subtle way. It’s important here that Calvero has NOT stepped in anything offensive, so the joke is about his booze-fuddled misapprehension, not actual faecal matter.

Chaplinesque cheapness: when Calvero shoulders Thereza’s door in (told you he was butch), the entire wall bends inwards. Building a set with a wall that can remain rigid in such circumstances is no small thing, but of course it’s perfectly possible, and necessary when you have a script that demands it. And LIMELIGHT was filmed with fairly strict fidelity to the script.

Deduct a few marks from art director Eugene Lourie, a man with a substantial career as designer (RULES OF THE GAME) and a less distinguished one as director (GORGO and other giant monster pics).

There’s more cheapness in the view from Calvero’s second-floor window. Lourie built a miniature London cityscape rather than having a painted backdrop executed, which is not a bad idea in itself. But it matters how you do it. A big, distant model with some kind of diffusion is always going to look better than a tiny model right beside the window frame. And even though we’re told this was a model, it LOOKS completely painted and completely flat. Which is in keeping with the look of all CC’s post-Charles D. Hall designs. Costa Gavras can claim that in THE GREAT DICTATOR the cheap flat look suggests something about the pasteboard artifice of fascism, that argument is weakened when the same flimsiness prevails in a film about the pre-war music hall.

(But we can entertain ourselves by imagining Gorgo or Behemoth the Sea Monster or the Rhedosaurus from THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS rampaging across the skyline, as they would in subsequent Lourie joints.)

There is of course an unfortunate irony about Chaplin recreating London in his last American film, and then being forced to recreate New York in his first British one. But that’s fully explained by the vicissitudes of fate — Chaplin would never have considered filming in the UK if he hadn’t been barred from entering the US, and he’d never have felt the need to make A KING IN NEW YORK if not for his exile.

I don’t think LIMELIGHT is very well edited. It’s the only film Joe Inge cut, but I assume Chaplin was looking over his shoulder the whole time, if Mr. Inge was short enough to allow this. So there’s an extremely awkward fade to black in mid-action, designed to splink out Dryden’s emetic treatment of Thereza — the film is much more delicate than THE APARTMENT on this score, and probably had to be in 1952. But fading is a crazy choice. A dissolve would work, but Chaplin would need to have provided some kind of angle change, or else targeted the camera on a time-lapse device like a glass that’s full and then empty. Direct cutting did exist, but was still very much a novelty, and wouldn’t even acquire a name until the nouvelle vague popularized it, and Chaplin would never adopt it. So he’s lumbered himself with an awkward transition.

He’s also lumbered himself with unnecessary exposition — while Thereza might need to ask “Where am I?” since she’s been moved while unconscious, there ought to be a way to avoid having Calvero summarise everything we’ve only just seen. This is the kind of thing that marks Chaplin as an amateur when it comes to dialogue. And LIMELIGHT is his most dialogue-heavy film to date. Fortunately, some good news is on the way — Marjorie Bennett, comic maid from MONSIEUR VERDOUX, is on her way…

Sacre Bluebeard

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.

The Crash

MONSIEUR VERDOUX finally establishes the date — it’s now November 1932, according to the newspaper montage covering a financial crash. Which is maybe a little off — the Great Depression got going in France the year before, but it was certainly still raging in ’32.

Two telephone calls establish that Verdoux is wiped out, and as if that weren’t bad enough, here are those guys again —

In the Verdoux Cinematic Universe, apparently, Heinkel and Napalini are called Hitler and Mussolini. I’m glad we don’t live in THAT universe.

Verdoux is discovered reading a newspaper at a cafe yet again — headlines about Guernica or a similar outrage. When he lowers the paper and gets up, his movements are slower, his expression troubled and confused. The newspaper reveal puts me in mind of the several such shots in the Thatcher montage in CITIZEN KANE, and the jaunty music, played in pure counterpoint to the situation, is reminiscent of Herrmann’s more on-the-nose accompaniment there. I wonder if Chaplin liked KANE? It’s possible this sequence betrays a faint influence, but CC either couldn’t or just didn’t take the stylistic influence further.

Reminder that Orson Welles presented the idea or maybe the story of VERDOUX to Chaplin, hoping to direct it himself. Chaplin was frequently accused of stealing ideas, but nothing much was made to stick. In this case, however, he was forced to give Welles a credit. THE GREAT DICTATOR also seems to have had its origins elsewhere, though the idea CC was accused of stealing was pretty vague.

Verdoux bumps into The Girl (Marilyn Nash), now shacking up with a wealthy munitions manufacturer. Some shack! Her previous invalid husband is evidently out of the picture, as are Verdoux’s wife and son. At the Cafe Royale, Chaplin executes an elegant camera move, pushing in on the dancers, following them across the floor, then letting them exit frame to reveal Verdoux and Girl at a table.

The fate of Mme. Verdoux and little Peter isn’t explained. On the one hand, it’s convenient for the narrative to drop them — their continued presence in the story would force Chaplin to solve certain problems. But is it more than convenient? Are we to assume that Verdoux has mercy-killed his family? And are we meant to accept the mercy part of it? Mme Verdoux being disabled makes this an uncomfortable thing to go along with, and, though poverty would have been tough on the child, Chaplin knew it was survivable.

The problem is, if Chaplin intended this to be clear, he has no means to make it so: Verdoux’s haunted expression as he tells of their death is equally appropriate if they’d fallen under a bus or been slain in a balloon ascension. It’s also quite possible that the censor would have banned any more explicit suggestion of euthanasia or infanticide. The line “they’re happier where they are” DOES seem, however, as if it might be intended as a broad hint.

Also — what has happened to The Girl’s husband, who I suppose we should call The Guy? “He’s out of the picture!” “He was never in it!” to quote McGinty and The Boss.

Verdoux laughs ruefully at the mention of Destiny — and, on cue, Almira Sessions and Edwin Mills enter the Cafe Royale. You remember them — two of the Couvais clan from the very start of the film, who have been seen conferring with the police throughout, as the manhunt for the nameless Landru continues. Are we going to learn what brings these yokels to such a swank gin-joint? Yes, apparently they’re being tourists, fresh from the Eiffel Tower.

(Different people have different reactions to the Eiffel Tower — one woman tried to marry it — but Fiona’s has always struck me as an interesting one: stark terror. Her knees practically buckled at the sight of it. “It’s too big!” There was no way she was going up it, but it was as if just seeing it caused her to imagine a hypothetical ascent, triggering an attack of ground-level vertigo. But I digress.)

Again, this is a scene of farce-comedy, as Keystone’s title cards would describe it. We wait in suspense for the Couvaises to spot their relative’s slayer. It’s one of the cruelest scenes in the film — making sport of the bereaved relatives. Chaplin has done his best to make the Couvais as unsympathetic as possible, but he hasn’t been able to firmly fix any reason why we shouldn’t feel sorry for the loss of their relative. I guess if he’d managed to establish that their animus against Verdoux was purely financial, that might have done it. As it is, the family seem to have no affection towards one another, and yet they’re a family and they do stick together. Also, their abrasiveness would make it easy to sympathise with the late, unseen Thelma, if we were given any encouragement to think of her, she who ran off with Verdoux presumably at least in part to get away from these mugs.

Almira Sessions is a great presence in Preston Sturges films — particularly as another acerbic spinster in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS. One can imagine Orson casting Agnes Moorehead. I somehow can’t laugh at her here. Her reaction to spotting Verdoux is a look towards camera, played dead straight. I picture Chaplin showing her what he wanted, and HE would have made it both dramatic and funny. A faster head turn, a more thunderstruck or poleaxed expression. I feel like Almira starts the scene off so seriously it’s very hard for the subsequent running about to find any comic purchase. I just spend it feeling sorry for the character and the actor.

But when Verdoux sees that Mademoiselle Couvais is shadowing him, HE does the head turn and look to camera, so maybe he didn’t want her to. By this point in Chaplin’s career, only he is allowed that fleeting intimacy with his chums in the audience. Which, in this film, makes us complicit with a mass-murderer.

Earlier, Verdoux has basically scoffed at The Girl’s insistance that one must persevere, but now, having lost everything he supposedly cared about — wife, son, home — and claiming that he’s awoken from a nightmare — his homicidal career — he still fights on. He seems at one point intent on assassinating Almira, but settle for locking up both his pursuers, and walking suavely away. However, this is only so that he can say goodnight to The Girl.

He grants us another affectionate look, and strolls back in to meet his fate, following the cops who have shown up in force. These are not exactly Keystone bumblers, but they’re played for fools as the killer moves around freely in their midst, at one point moved gently aside so they can break in a door.

Verdoux could at any point surrender, but the desire to live is very strong, and by passively hanging about he puts himself in the hands of Destiny. It doesn’t seem that more is required of him. Almira, freed, faints at the sight of the fugitive, and Verdoux obligingly cushions her fall and helps her to her feet. BIG comic gesticulations now, which Almira doesn’t seem quite the right player to perform, Maybe because her voice never gets as loud as her gestures? Something seems off.

“Henri Verdoux?!”

“At your service.”

TO BE CONCLUDED