Cinema (Hollywood) (1947)

'rj^1fc %' •5T' I tsau >/ ^»'/ ■'▼^B ■jp*f7*:^H Ea<*^I »i\ I\h 1 5 I ivi tSflHflff' A 3 mi ijS I si Ha I L MONSIEUR VERDOUX" Produced, directed, written and music composed by Charles Chaplin. Associate directors: Robert Florey and Wheeler Dryden. Starring Charles Chaplin and with Martha Raye, Isobel Elsom, Marilyn Nash, Robert Lewis, William Frawley. Chaplin's newest comedy, "Monsieur Verdoux" — his first in more than six years — is his most serious and totally successful. In its social purpose it is bolder and more incisive than anything he has yet made. Furthermore, it signalizes a sharp break with the Chaplin of the past — the traditional romantic who moves uncertain and helpless in a world he does not understand. In this new film Chaplin shows he understands the world only too well. In this sense, "Monsieur Yerdoux" is a new coming-of-age of a significant film maker and a solid contribution to the American screen. In the past. Chaplin's films were nearly all variations on one theme : protest against the crushing of the individual by social forces. His comedy emphasized the human against regimentation and pleaded for the rights of the individual. In these pictures — except for the role of Hitler in ''The Great Dictator" — Chaplin was a 'little' man, the butt of jests and harassed by poverty, the law, and social forces he can neither understand nor resist. Always this protagonist was confused, bewildered, slapped-about, a poignant symbol of the common man. But in "Monsieur Yerdoux" the protagonist is no longer the fumbling, pathetic little man in baggy pants. That sartorial symbol has been discarded for the natty waistcoat, ascot tie and striped trousers of the new Chaplin character, the modern business man. Yerdoux is no "Charlie," the dreamer thinking of pie-in-the-sky, but a hardboiled cynic, an executive, who, as stated by Chaplin himself, is wise to the ways of the world l>ased on a business immorality and acts accordingly. The metamorphosis is evidence of a new intellectual development. The plot of "Monsieur Yerdoux" is simple and JUNE 1947 reviewed by LEWIS JACOBS ingenuous, but sharp and eloquent in its social commentary. The depression of 1930 has cost Verdoux, a bank clerk, his job. Since he has a wife and child whom he loves and must support, he resorts to the business of marrying women and killing them for their money. "I am in business," says Verdoux, "and I must do my duty after the classic heroic mode." Nevertheless he considers himself a very moral man ; he never lets these women touch him. He hates his work ; he hates the women. Though the story is laid in pre-war France it has meaning to people all over the world today. For, it is obvious from the satirical way Chaplin tells it. the motion picture is not just a funny story of a murderer but a witty travesty on an unethical business-minded society. A free-flowing cartoon alive with clowning and gags, its humor reaches wild caprice, rowdy slapstick and low burlesque. In a desperate attempt to get fifty thousand frances before morning, Yerdoux makes passionate love to a rich victim, who has come to lease the house of a wealthy widow he has just finished off, by playing ring around the trunk with her. Again, later in the film, Yerdoux takes one of his wives for a boat ride in order to drown her, having failed to kill her in bed. His ludicrous attempts to throw her overboard, tied to a heavy rock, fail. He then tries to chloroform her only to succeed in chloroforming himself. When she revives him, he attempts to push her overboard again but instead falls into the lake himself and she has to rescue him ! During another sequence Verdoux reproves one of his wives for buying a phoney diamond. Angrily he shouts: "It's glass you ass !" Underneath the film's broad gayiety can be dis 11