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(1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) show another Charlie yet — the ardent crusader, who was there from the beginning, expressing with sly pantomime, with sharp satire, with humour and ridicule, his profound awareness and hatred of cruelty, vice and misery, of vanity, oppression, and the orgiastic destruction of war. All his work is an expression of a fundamental love of humanity, and hatred of its oppressors; all his work is a preparation for his annihilation of soulless industrialization in Modern Times; for the thunderous eloquence of his overthrow of fascism in The Great Dictator; for the cold, clear judgment of modern society, with its callous indifference to human dignity, security and life itself, that is the essence of Monsieur Verdoux, the apotheosis of them all, Charlie in his ultimate form to date.
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IT IS CURIOUS THAT THE FIRST FILM CHAPLIN MADE FOR UNITED
Artists was a mordant tragedy, from which Charlie was banished. Throughout the early work of Chaplin, the underlying tragic note has grown in insistence. From the beginning, Chaplin wished to make a tragedy, as fragments of a serious film to be called Life, dating from 1915, can testify; an ambition to produce, not to play, Hamlet. It is possible that he wished to show Hollywood, who now tended to despise comedy, that he was capable of making a great and serious film; and it was well known that he had for a long time wished to give Edna Purviance a leading role of major importance. She was, as an artist, almost entirely the work of his hands, and he wanted to try her in an exacting part. Chaplin called upon all his great artist's patience, summoned all his gift, all his technique, to create what he clearly intended to be his tragic masterpiece; and produced by the end of 1923, A Woman Of Paris, a work of unyielding pessimism, filled with a cruel and biting irony unlike any that had yet come from him.
Apart from its significance in Chaplin's evolution as an artist, the film had a very great influence on cinema. It was an original film from which a school of cinematic art was derived — the ancestor of sophisticated drama in film; the progenitor of all films dealing with psychological complexity. It was also the forerunner of simplicity of technique, the paring down to essentials that had always been typical of Chaplin's work, and which was destined to overthrow the fussy and complicated overstatement of early American film. This bareness of effect, so brilliantly successful in Chaplin's hands, counteracted the excessive use of technical effects much favoured at that time. Moreover, as Seldes points out "When Chaplin made A Woman of Paris as producer and director, it was considered an idiosyncrasy, almost as if