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than a reel and a half of film to make this point. Chaplin does it in 200 feet ! The camera dollies up to the tombstone of the late Monsieur Verdoux, with a few remarks on the sound track concerning the circumstances under which he lost his job, murdered women, was captured and then beheaded. Then the camera pans over graveyard mist and with the aid of the narrator, dissolves to that time when Verdoux was still alive. We see thick, black smoke pouring out of a chimney, while Monsieur Verdoux is packing up what remains of a woman's clothes. Two neighbors stare at the smoke and one remarks, "Don't know what they've put in that furnace. It's been burning for two days now." Then Monsieur Verdoux walks into his study, takes out a huge pile of bills — money left by the lady he murdered — and with incredible precision of motion and with an attitude of work-a-day activity, Monsieur Verdoux, always the bank clerk, swiftly and expertly counts the bills. The audience bursts into laughter, for
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they suddenly sense the whole story of the contradiction between the man, his environment, his inner dynamics, and the fantastic profession he is now embarked upon.
At the end of the film, Mr. Chaplin wishes us to understand that befuddled and psychopathetic as this bank clerk may be, he is the victim of insuperable obstacles and he is, withal, a human being about to face a guillotine which waits to impose razor-edged justice. There is no time for philosophical speeches, nor in the logic of the story is it possible for other characters to reveal sympathetic reactions to Monsieur Verdoux. In 20 feet of film, Chaplin does this job through action. The warden offers the condemned man a cigarette and a drink. Monsieur Verdoux accepts the cigarette, rejects the drink. Then he asks what the drink is and upon learning that it is rum, remarks, "I never tasted rum before. Yes, thank you, I will have it." Now he takes the rum, brings the glass to his lips and in order to
drink, brings his head far back so that the audience is face to face with the full, white, live pulsating anatomy of his throat. Suddenly, your emotions tell you that in a moment the pipes which allow the rum to go from his lips into his body, to give it warmth, are about to be severed forever by a coldly impersonal and powerfully devastating knife.
' I 'HESE approaches of the masters -* of film making are evidence in local sections of film of what is true of the film as a whole — that which I have been attempting to establish in this paper. Motion, which, when made specific in terms of the entire picture means plot and story line, and Deeds, which in terms of local esquences were indicated in the examples just cited and are all part of plot action — are the foundation upon which characterization is achieved in the film art. Plot and characterization are not in conflict with one another. They are two parts of the same thing in an art form called the motion picture.
The Screen Writer, May, 1948
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