Monsieur Verdoux - Der Frauenmörder von Paris

A satire on a serial killer is not your everyday movie fare. I can see why audiences of that day were turned off by the Little Tramp's sudden homicidal turn. Of course, it's all treated with a light comedic hand until the moralizing end. Still, Chaplin's subtext comes through clearly at certain points-, such that unemployment can drive men to extremes when they've got a family to support.

On the other hand, not every man, of course, turns to fleecing rich widows and then dispatching them in cold-blooded fashion. But that brings him to his second point--- namely "numbers sanctify". Kill one person and you're a murderer; kill a thousand and you're a hero. Here it appears he's referring to the state that historically kills by the thousands in the name of the patriotism. Remember, the movie's coming right after the close of the horrific WWII, and he finds the point ironic.

But Verdoux's not through. Capitalism is indirectly indicted for its periodic booms and busts that lead to joblessness, and millions upon millions for munitions manufacturers who prosper during wartime. As for the consolations of religion that come at the end, the gentleman killer appears indifferent without being insulting. Since Chaplin's the sole screenwriter, it's no stretch to believe he's speaking for himself on these matters. Given this rather wholesale indictment of many of the West's leading institutions, small wonder he left the country shortly after under a cloud of controversy.

Nonetheless, the movie hits its comedic highpoints with Martha Raye as the loudly vulgar Annabella. Try as he does to do her in, she manages to comically thwart him at every turn. That scene in the fishing boat's a classic. All his polished charm and oily flattery just slide by her obnoxious silliness. Raye makes a perfect foil and an inspired piece of casting.

Of course, some of the beguiling Little Tramp remains in Verdoux's character, as when he befriends the penniless girl (Nash), or in that supremely ironic moment when he ambles Tramp-style toward the guillotine. All in all, it's a strange little movie that was apparently shelved for years for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, it was rather gutsy for Chaplin to take such chances with his established character and at Cold War's outset. It's fairly humorous until you think about its serious points, which are still worth pondering.

As Charlie Chaplin put it when the tramp finally talked in The Great Dictator the magic was gone. Chaplin felt he had to come up with another character in order to continue his career and he got away from the lovable Little Tramp as far as he could with Monsieur Verdoux.

A whole lot of people were shocked when Monsieur Verdoux came out and instead of the Tramp we got a Bluebeard murderer. Black comedy was not a genre popular in the USA at that time and a lot of people hated this film. None more so than Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper who as a good conservative Republican cheered on the coming blacklist and beat the drums for Chaplin's deportation. No accident that Chaplin was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time Monsieur Verdoux came out.

Based on the famous French mass criminal Henry Desire Landru, Monsieur Verdoux tells the story of a bank clerk who lost his job and to support his family started marrying and murdering rich women. Verdoux keeps quite a schedule because he's marrying several of them at the same time. But always returns to wife Mady Correll and son Allison Roddan.

Funniest marriage is to Martha Raye who not only is he unsuccessful in killing, she nearly does him in on a couple of occasions strictly by accident. That raucous laugh might elicit sympathy from a jury if anyone ever heard it and was condemned to live with it even part time.

With the marriage to Raye comes the film's funniest sequence Chaplin trying to kill Raye when they were in a boat on a lake in Switzerland. It will not escape your attention that the sequence is borrowed from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy which was already filmed in 1931 and would shortly be filmed again in 1951 as A Place In The Sun. Ironic indeed how the same plot gambits can be played for laughs or deadly serious.

Second funniest is Raye showing up at Chaplin's wedding to Isobel Elsom whom he has targeted. It forces him to leave her at the altar not knowing at that time how lucky she was.

Truth be told some of Chaplin's left wing political views are grafted into the film somewhat forcibly. It's what got Hedda Hopper's undergarments in such a twist. Still this an amusing film and not fairly judged by a lot of people at the time it came out.

The word "Bluebeard" ("Landru" in French) has been a part of the American vernacular for some time now, synonymous with the term "wife-killer." Several variations of the infamous Parisian charmer who married then buried have been filmed over the decades - some OK, others not. John Carradine starred in a respectable but unheralded version in the mid-30s as a puppeteer-turned-perpetual strangler. A so-so French/Italian co-production in 1962 starring Charles Denner and Michele Morgan strove for dark comedy but ultimately lacked the creative spark. The worst of the lot was a wretched Richard Burton/Raquel Welch/Joey Heatherton rehash in the 70s, the nadir of Burton's screen career.

It seems most fitting then that the wry, comic genius of Charlie Chaplin, our beloved "Little Tramp," is allowed to put its delightfully macabre spin on the Bluebeard tale with 1947's "Monsieur Verdoux," winding up with perhaps the most entertaining version yet. First and foremost, it is a pleasure to hear Charlie talk. I also venture to say this is the best of his sound-era films, well-mounted and shot meticulously in black and white, in which he not only produced and directed but provided the music. Who but the loveable Chaplin, with that ever-present tinge of pathos, could play the role of a methodical, unrepentant human wife-disposal who kills purely for financial reward, and have the audience rooting for him!

Our titular hero is a charming fop of a fellow who operates his deadly deception by a precise timetable - he fastidiously charms, marries and eliminates his unsuspecting victims with keen attention paid to banker's hours! But it's Monsieur Verdoux's motive that gains the viewer's empathy. Our boy is not the mad, demented, twisted, cold-hearted monster one must think. He carries out his dastardly deeds out of selfless need. His out-of-town "business" is conducted solely in order to support and tend to his wheelchair-bound wife, a hopeless cripple and invalid, and family. His devotion, in fact, is so honorable, he succeeds in wrapping you around his little wedding finger. As much as you sympathize for the dowagers he does in, you can't help but think at least the old dears died having been graced by such a noble gentleman.

Brash loudster Martha Raye, often considered a bust in films for being intolerably larger-than-life, has one of her best roles here, grabbing her share of laughs as one of Verdoux's intended victims - a shrill, obnoxious, but verrrry wealthy dame whom nobody would really mind seeing knocked off. The problem is Charlie can't seem to off her! Every industrious attempt fails miserably. In one truly madcap scene that directly parodies Theodore Dreiser's classic novel "An American Tragedy," Charlie takes Martha, outlandishly bedecked in silver fox furs, out on a crude fishing boat excursion in the hopes of drowning the tenacious harridan. Two comic masters in vintage form.

Of course, Charlie does get his comeuppance but its all done in grand, sophisticated style. The whole movie is, in fact, so precise and polished that one must forgive him, given his controversial "subversive" leanings at the time, for tacking on an interminable, out-of-character piece of political diatribe at the finishing line. The movie's theme and bitter irony did not even pretend to disguise his great personal anguish and bitterness at America when political conservatives were breathing down his neck. Forgiven he is, for this black comedy, a sublime, eloquent retread of an old familiar creeper, comes off refreshingly original.

In his autobiography Charles Chaplin called this film his "cleverest and most brilliant" comedy, yet very few people at the time the movie was released shared this view. It was the first Chaplin US failure both with critics and audiences (though in Europe the film did quite well).

Here Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a serial killer who makes his living by marrying and murdering lonely reach women. Chaplin softened his character by making him a lifelong bank clerk who was laid off at the age when it was already too late to start life anew, meanwhile he has a family to support (a small son and an invalid wife). He's caught and put to trial where he accuses a hypocritical society of sanctioned mass murders and describes himself as an amateur in the field. Originally the idea belonged to Orson Welles who wanted to make a movie based on the story of a notorious murderer Henri Landru, a Frenchman who was executed in 1922 for murdering 8 women. Welles asked Chaplin to star in his film but the latter refused as he thought it was too late for him to play in a movie directed by someone else. But he bought the original idea from Welles and made what could have been a detective story or a thriller into a black comedy. It was certainly provocative and its sarcastic and ironic gravity was astonishing for the time. There is a scene, for instance, when Verdoux while waiting for the execution, talks to a journalist and pronounces the words that still fill me with horror (as they are as true nowadays as they had been fifty years ago):"Wars, conflicts - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify." Yet "Monsieur Verdoux" which is generally known as the most pessimistic of Chaplin films is not devoided of humour. On the contrary, at some moments it's extraordinary funny: take for instance the famous scenes with his "wives" (Annabella or Lydia)or those with madam Grosnay (my favourite bit is when Verdoux is talking to her from a flower shop, the look at the flower girl's face is wonderful!). I believe the film is one of the best I've ever seen and I highly recommend it to everyone.

... not that he made that many of them.

Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a man who goes about marrying and then killing upper middle class middle-aged women for their money and property. If he was known to be around at the time of their death, he disposes of their bodies in such a way that they will never be found. If he was not known to be around, then he doesn't bother to dispose of their bodies and just takes the cash he needs with him, leaving like he was never there.

It's awhile before it is revealed that Verdoux was what we now call "laid off" from his job at a bank after 30 years during the Depression that gripped Europe after WWI and as a result of that he is on a tear, married to multiple soon to be murder victims at a time, in order to provide for his actual crippled wife and child and eventually retire from this sordid business.

You never actually see Chaplin do any violence. That would just be too stunning of an image. So everything is insinuated, such as him disposing of the property of a recently deceased wife while the incinerator out back has been going full steam for three days. Martha Raye plays one of Verdoux's more annoying and lively wives, and if you think she is too good of a comedienne for Verdoux just to visit and abruptly kill her, you'd be right. His near attempts are hilariously disrupted, including one attempt that is stopped by a group of yodlers with binoculars. Will he eventually be successful? I'd say watch and find out.

In the parts of the film where Chaplin combines action, slapstick, and dialogue, the production is outstanding. At the end where he relies more on dialogue alone, I wouldn't say it drags, but I would say it is a bit "off". I get that Chaplin is trying to compare the furor that is created over the murder of a dozen people by a serial killer to society's indifference over millions dying as a result of war or famine, but I think the rather sentimental one liners he throws out blunt and muddle his message considerably.