When he loses his job due to the Great Depression, Verdoux (Charles Chaplin) turns to a new career: romancing, swindling and murdering wealthy widows.
I have not seen much of Charles Chaplin’s work. I watched Modern Times at university years ago, and I watched this film a couple weeks ago.
Coming at it as a novice, Monsieur Verdoux is fascinating. I am keen to watch more of Chaplin’s work, but on its own terms this movie is really fascinating.
You can tell that the filmmaker is coming at the film from a sensibility rooted in visual story-telling rather than dialogue. The photography favours wide, static shots that allow for Chaplin’s various physical gags. Chaplin’s sense of timing and choreography is perfect - the physicality of the set pieces is impressive, particularly in terms of how manages to juggle the film’s tone.
There is a deliciously dark vein of irony to these scenes, particularly the subplot with Annabella, played by the divine Martha Raye. Loud and brash, she is set up as the perfect target for being a) rich and b) completely self-absorbed. Raye is a riot, storming through the movie with all the tact of a tank through a playground. While there are certainly reasons to dislike her - she repeatedly hires and fires her maid for ridiculous reasons - there is something weirdly winning about the woman.
She glides through the movie, both completely unaware of, and impervious to, Verdoux’s various attempts to murder her. Their scene on the lake is a masterpiece of black comedy, as Verdoux’s attempts to rid himself of the woman are foiled in increasingly ridiculous ways.
While Chaplin is great in the title role, Annabella is the movie’s secret weapon - I have never seen Raye before, and she stole every scene she was in.
While the film handles its murderous subplots with assurance, the film falters when it comes to Verdoux’s motivation.
The reveal of Verdoux’s family, his disabled wife and young child, comes off as so cloying and ridiculous. The camera dwells on his wife’s impairment in a way that feels so cliched and manipulative that it almost threw me out of the movie. It almost unbalanced the movie. This sequence is also so detached from the rest of the movie that the portrayal of his wife just comes off as offensive stereotyping - she exists purely so that we have sympathy for Verdoux’s plight.
The film is on surer footing when it comes to the way it portrays society's indifference to the humanity of ordinary people struggling through the Depression. Verdoux's final speech, in which points out the different moral standard between murderers and state-sanctioned violence, frankly feels more defined and disturbing. It made me wonder if the film would have worked if Chaplin had nixed the family subplot.
The scenes that work better are Verdoux’s redemptive scenes with Marilyn Nash, a poor woman he picks up with the intention of poisoning, are better. However, the scene where he calls off his murder attempt is nicely underplayed but after the reveal of his family I could not quite trust these attempts to redeem him. In these scenes with Nash, you get a sense of Verdoux’s immense loneliness and self-awareness that brings more of an edge and pathos to his schemes.
While the subplot with his family is dire, Monsieur Verdoux is worth checking out. Its stumbles highlight how tricky it is to achieve its particular tone, but when it works Monsieur Verdoux is hilarious.
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