Monsieur Verdoux Charlie Chaplin (USA; 1947)
Monsieur Verdoux Charlie Chaplin (USA; 1947) Charlie Chaplin; Martha Raye; Maryilyn Nash
Viewed: dvd
no more Mr Nice Guy
In movies the dead speak. And of course besides M Verdoux and his victims there is some one else who dies in this film.
As Chaplin’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery past the gravestone of Monsieur Verdoux, the eponymous subject (based on serial killer Henri Landru) provides in voice over a short justificatory explanation of his journey to the grave. The Voice relates how he’d been a bank teller for 30 years before being summarily dismissed. With a family to suppor (comprising as we later find out, a disabled wife and young son) he had resorted to a series of business transactions involving the liquidation of wealthy women. Monsieur Verdoux explains that for him this was ‘a business’, but a business in which one needed some luck – which unfortunately he didn’t have.
The use of the word ‘liquidation’! It has a double meaning: one of converting assets into cash; the second, a vernacular euphemism, meaning to kill without compunction. Using the word in this manner sets up the philosophical consideration offered up to the audience by Verdoux during his trial for murder at the end of the movie. Delivered with Chaplinesque panache it’s his ironic rapier thrust into the heart of contempary hypocrisy where he points out that the Capitalist system produces vast industries for the production of armaments and weapons with the consequential need to foster wars of mass destruction and the slaughter of millions. In contrast Verdoux points out that he is being tried and condemned for the death of a few people. Verdoux concludes that he is a mere amateur by comparison. The point made is not to justify his actions, but to place them in the context of a moral counterbalance. Just a thought.
Verdoux is a black comedy centred on Charlie’s superb playing of the killer. His play out of the clown murderer is immaculate: his precision in action – such as preparing the poison – his balletic balance – his mobility of face – allied to the soothing British charm of his voice are all compressed into the character, the clown intent on the business of marrying and killing rich women for the sake of their money. There are a couple of unconvincing scenes in which Chaplin in the style of Harpo Marx has resort to Sennet style slapstick routines in going after a potential women victim. But in his controlled expression of comic purpose Chaplin has never been better. And of course the blood money from his dark deeds has ‘an innocent purpose’: it’s used to maintain Verdoux’ disabled wife and son. Verdoux, a selfless dark Harlequin.
There are wonderful highlights – Verdoux counting the victims’ money – Chaplin breaking through frame and full face addressing the audience as to the nature of his ‘work’ – the sequences with Martha Raye. There were also strange holes in the scripting: in particular the death of his wife and son, announced precipitously by Verdoux raising the unanswered question as to whether they had died natural deaths or had he killed them, unable to bare the brutal reality of not being able the continue to care for them? This question is left hanging on Verdoux’ coat-tails. And the bad luck? This seemed to entail, not his getting caught but rather his decision to invest his ill gotten gains in stocks and shares before the market crashed.
What is central to the emotional feel of Chaplin’s ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ is its complete lack of either sentimentality or regret, both in relation to the inner scripting of the film and to its outer metaplay of Chaplin’s own career trajectory. There’s one apparent exception. Verdoux has no doubts no stabs of conscious in relation to his ‘liquidations’ whether it be the wealthy women or the cop who gets wise to him. They all have to die. The apparent exception is ‘The Girl’, a waif whom Verdoux sets up as a victim, a lab rat in effect, to test out the efficacy of his poison. He nearly carries through with her murder, but stops at the last moment when her story and her goodness touch his heart. She is spared as Verdoux affected, obeys the dictates of his conscience. You might say: “Sentimental!’ But no Chaplin countervails this moment in a later scene where he meets up again with the waif, now come good, who tells him her fortunes have changed because she has married an arms manufacturer and business is booming! They’re in the money!
So no sentimentality is the order of the day and this of course applies to Chaplin himself in making ‘Verdoux’. The film in which he makes the decision once and for all to kill off his alter ego, ‘The Little Tramp’. Without regret without compassion in cold blood. His time is up.
Verdoux now exemplified the times, the man of the moment: as amoral as the arms manufacturers and like them, a good father and husband.
Chaplin did not have to make of himself an unsentimental serial killer. He chose to adopt a persona that was the complete opposite of ‘The Little Tramp’. After Verdoux there could be no way back to the innocence of a character who was now out of place in a world without innocence.
Verdoux is not caught. He is discovered. He could have escaped but he choses to give himself up of his own free will to the police. There’s no bathos nor pathos, simply his calculated decision to chose certain death.
The scenes comprising Verdoux’s last moments are cool and completely lacking in emotion, not tragic, simply timely, and these moments equate with Chaplin’s own disposal of ‘The Little Tramp’. It’s time for him to go and he’s dispatched with the same equanimity with which one might discard a pair of old worn and holed socks. Verdoux initially refuses the rum he’s offered, then commenting he’s never tasted rum and might as well try it, picks up the glass and necks it. He faces the priest, no last rites, simply responding with a contained dignity to the visitation. Then the final shot: head held high without hesitation he walks past the camera, turns with his back to us and walks to the (unseen) guillotine. And as he moves away from us towards the place of execution a guard either side of him, we see just the merest hint of that ‘walk’. A walk towards the end. For Veroux and ‘The Tramp’.
Black comedies about serial killers were choice filmic morsels of the post World War ll era. Besides ‘Verdoux’ there was also Robert Hamer’s ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ (1949) starring Alex Guinness. It tells of a disowned son murdering his way to an inherited Baronetcy. But it’s difficult to imagine any one wanting to make black comedies about the serial killers of the 20th and 21st centuries, men such as Ian Brady, Fred West and Peter Sutcliff. For some people, in the age of the self-made image, to be a serial killer has become a (self fulfilling?) career choice: killings perpetrated in order to become famous or rather infamous. The era of increasing hostility by some men to the changed and increasing status of women in society appears to be linked to increasing murders of women, usually women in relationships, but many carried out simply as a function of ingrained sexual hostility. Chaplin had his own axe to grind with money chasing women and with Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, but the film stands as dark metaphysical fable of ‘business’. Likewise ‘Kind Hearts…’ works as satire on class prejudice. But I think in our contemporary charged psychic atmosphere it is no longer possible to see these films as grounded in metaphorical or social concerns, as black comedies with unusual settings. The form taken by the narratives of quasi justified serial killing, for many people will outweigh any parodic or satirical intent of the film maker. The which makes the public exhibition of the titles problematic. Programmers will have to weigh up moral psychological social political as well as artistic considerations in deciding whether or not to screen these titles.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk