Monsieur Verdoux
by Charles Chaplin
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Audrey Betz, Charles Chaplin, Irving Bacon, Marjorie Bennett, Virginia BrissacDirector: Charles Chaplin
Brand: Warner Brothers
Primary Contributor: Charles Chaplin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Georgian (Subtitled); Chinese (Subtitled); Thai (Subtitled); French (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 124 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-03-02
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Monsieur Verdoux
Movie Review: Reveals much about Chaplin
Summary: 3 Stars
According to the commentary included with this 1947 film, Chaplin considered Monsieur Verdoux one of his best films. It would be more accurate to regard it as one of the best for illustrating his enormous vanity and self-obsession. In his 1940 film, The Great Dictator, Chaplin found humor in Hitler, who resembled him slightly in appearance and more than slightly in ego. In this film he finds a similar humor in a French serial killer who woes and murders women for their money. For Chaplin, the central figure in all human history and the only person who matters is always himself.
A better man would have used the film as a launching pad for actors younger, poorer, and less well-established than himself. Chaplin, who also wrote and directed it, sees it as another opportunity to strut his talents. No other actor was given a major role. Even the pretty young woman (Marilyn Nash) who has the second most important role merely exists to inflate our opinion of M. Verdoux. We are supposed to be impressed that, intending to kill her to test a new poison, he takes pity and lets her live. Chaplin is that self-obsessed.
In a city park, I once had to tell a man throwing knives at a tree just a few feet from a busy walkway that he had to stop. He defended his actions by talking about all those who die in highway accidents each year. I told the deluded twit that he was talking nonsense, that there was no relationship between the danger that one of his knives would bounce off a tree, hitting an child's eye and far away car crashes. In this film, Chaplin, scriptwriter and actor, is equally deluded. He really does think he is demonstrating a superiority morality when he compares his murders to the millions who die in wars: "As a mass killer," a smug and smiling Verdoux tells us, "I am an amateur in comparison."
This film may be sick as a comedy, but it is worth watching for what it tells us about Chaplin's politics and, by extension, the politics of similar celebrities today. When G. K. Chesterton warned between the wars that Germany would start another and still more horrible war, he explained why pacifists and militarists "are always in alliance, by a fatal logic far beyond any conscious conspiracy." By defining every aspect of war as evil, he wrote, they equate the arsonist with the firefighter. Chaplin does just that in this film, equating the French and English, who certainly did not want the war that had ended two years before, with Nazi Germany, which did. M. Verdoux (and by extension M. Chaplin) is claiming to be above any criticism we might direct at him. He is that vain and that self-obsessed. That's the main message this film carries.
Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
Summary of Monsieur Verdoux
Charles Chaplin turns his traditionally sunny sensibilities inside out with this sublime black comedy about a family man who secretly uses murder to support his beloved invalid wife and child. There's little of the immortal Tramp in Verdoux, yet the fastidious dandy is not lacking in comic graces. Most hilarious of all are the always-foiled attempts to dispatch the raucous Annabella (Martha Raye). When this most atypical Chaplin film opened, the world was not ready to look death in the face and walk away smiling. Today, Monsieur Verdoux ranks among Chaplin's best works. It is killer comedy.This blistering little black comedy was well ahead of its time when released in 1947. Originally, Orson Welles had wanted Chaplin to star in his drama about a French mass murderer named Landru, but Chaplin was hesitant to act for another director, and used the idea himself. He plays a dapper gent named Henri Verdoux (who assumes a number of identities), a civilized monster who marries wealthy women, then murders them (as we meet him, he's gathering roses as an incinerator ominously bellows smoke in the background) and collects their money to support his real family. The Little Tramp is now a distant memory, though this was the first film not to feature Chaplin's beloved creation. Verdoux is largely viciously clever until it gets too heavy-handed, as evidenced when a woman he spares returns years later as the mistress of a munitions manufacturer. Ultimately, Chaplin breaks character (much as he did in The Great Dictator) to preach to the masses, declaring that against the machines of war that grip the planet, humble killer Verdoux is "an amateur by comparison." --David Kronke
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