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Monsieur Verdoux can be no disappointment to those who have followed the unhesitating course of Chaplin's artistic and personal evolution; it becomes for them a fulfilment of promise, rich in symbolism. It is a major paradox, more subtle than anything Chaplin ever did before.
Much was made of the fact that Chaplin was said to have based the film upon Landru, but it would be as absurd to overestimate the importance of sources in this case as in Shakespeare's. The outline of the character Verdoux is similar to that of Landru, a similar social psychology serves to explain them both; and they were both excellent family men! Landru's "magnetic eye" is gloriously caricatured in Verdoux's seduction scenes. But that is all, and it was clearly never Chaplin's purpose to present a bowdlerized life of Landru.
A source of greater significance in the film is to be found in an element drawn from modern American society — the preponderance of wealthy widows who form a parasitic shell upon the living organism of Society, maintaining their wealth at all costs while contributing nothing to the organism supporting them. Verdoux's murders are a symbol of Chaplin's desire to exterminate the parasites, who, by their very existence, force wide open the gap between wealth and poverty, take away Verdoux's cherished home and reduce thousands like him to penury. This desire is stimulated no doubt by his romanticism towards women, prone to turn to bitter hatred of those among them who tried to destroy him.
Once the social scene is set, Chaplin drives home his condemnation of its folly and evil by taking its guiding principles to their logical limit. That indifference to individual liberty, callousness towards human suffering, carelessness towards life itself, that are for him the basic factors in modern society become part and parcel of Verdoux's modus vivendi. Forced into an impasse by social chaos, he applies the principles underlying that chaos to secure for himself and his family an adequate livelihood. So that finally, society, in condemning him, condemns itself; in destroying him, implies the necessity for its own destruction; in denouncing him as anti-social, reduces itself to terms of anarchy. Therein lies the essential paradox of Monsieur Verdoux-, and the core of Chaplin's most scathing indictment of the times in which we live.
Another profoundly interesting aspect of the film lies in its presentation of Charlie and his duality, the subtlest yet. For Verdoux is the little tramp in reverse, the other side of Charlie.
Chaplin has in his possession thousands of feet of film of himself in magnificent costumes, the perfect dandy. That fact is significant, taken with the ragged elegance of the little tramp of the early films, and the