Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 26) I watched one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen in a while, a movie I found myself liking better than I have before: Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy in which he played a man who, after working as a bank clerk for over 30 years, suddenly loses his job during the 1929 Depression. He goes into business for himself as a serial seducer of women; he gets them to turn over their small but significant fortunes to him and then he kills them. Chaplin made this movie at a quite uncertain time in his personal history; he’d been through a couple of sex scandals, including one in which he was put on trial for statutory rape by a young actress named Joan Barry whom he’d been grooming for a part in a never-made movie called Shadow and Substance. Chaplin was acquitted in the trial, but subsequently Barry sued him for paternity and won a court order requiring Chaplin to support her child despite a blood test that proved he couldn’t have been the biological father. Chaplin was also under fire for his politics, including the fact that he hadn’t served in World War II in either the American or British armed services (he had been exempted from the draft in World War I because he was only 5’ 4” tall and just over one hundred pounds, and he pointed out that while he hadn’t served in World War II, his oldest sons both had) as well as his overall Leftism and in particular his internationalism. At one point, asked why he’d never become an American citizen despite his long residency in the U.S., Chaplin said, “I consider myself a citizen of the entire world; I owe no allegiance to any particular country.” That got him in much the same kind of political hot water as John Lennon later encountered when he wrote a song that said, among other things, “Imagine there’s no countries.” In fact, I once drew a parallel between Chaplin and Lennon as radical British artists who were threatened with expulsion from the U.S. (and in Chaplin’s case he actually was expelled) over their internationalist views during times of heavy-duty political repression.

Monsieur Verdoux was Chaplin’s first-ever box-office flop after a film career that had lasted 33 years, and it probably would have been a tough sell even if it hadn’t been hurt badly by the political and sexual controversies swirling around Chaplin at the time. For one thing, it was a “black comedy” before black comedy became a “thing” – even in the best of times audiences wouldn’t have known what to make of seeing the formerly lovable Chaplin playing a black-hearted villain who murders women for their money. James Agee wrote extensively about Monsieur Verdoux in both The Nation and Time, and among the things he pointed out about it was that Verdoux the character was a throwback to the villains he had played in his very earliest films for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio: the opportunistic reporter in his first movie, Making a Living, and the cold-blooded seducer he was in his first feature, Tillie’s Punctured Romance. (I remember seeing Tillie’s Punctured Romance for the first time in a storefront theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s, and you could feel the hostility from the audience when they realized the man they were used to seeing as the sympathetic “Tramp” was playing a black-hearted villain.) It also didn’t help that the advertising campaign for Monsieur Verdoux practically dared audiences to like it: the slogan on the original posters read, “Chaplin Changes! Can You?” Yet Chaplin’s 1965 autobiography made clear that he had no idea Verdoux might fail at the box office; he seems to have just assumed it would be a hit.

Monsieur Verdoux is a film I’ve gradually grown to like better over the years; this time around I found it quite estimable and right now I’d rank it alongside my list of movies that don’t quite achieve what they set out to do, but even falling short of their goals accomplish more than most films. (Among the other movies I’d put in this category are George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett, Alfred Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn and Marnie, Orson Welles’ The Trial and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.) Monsieur Verdoux was based on an idea suggested by Orson Welles – and on one go-round with the film I thought it might have been a better movie if Welles had directed it as well and James Agee had been hired to write the script. A Welles-directed Verdoux would have certainly been more noir–ish than the one we got, with Chaplin as his own director, writer and composer, and Roland Totheroh as his cinematographer (he’d been with Chaplin since 1915!) – but noir-ish atmospherics might have played against the comedy instead of reinforcing it. This time around I found myself loving the movie, albeit not unreservedly; at times – especially in the opening scene in which members of the Couvais family are wondering what became of their relative, a woman who came into a small but substantial inheritance and then disappeared with her new husband – it looks like an early-1950’s TV sitcom. But it also features brilliant performances by at least three of the principals: Chaplin himself, trotting out his old seduction lines at various women and getting surprisingly far with them; Martha Raye, who was on the downgrade from her former fame (as Jack Oakie had been when Chaplin cast him as the Mussolini analogue in his Hitler spoof The Great Dictator) but is absolutely brilliant here; and Isobel Elsom, bringing a rare sense of dignity to a role as one of Verdoux’s would-be pigeons. Indeed, I remember reading an interview with Martha Raye in TV Guide in the early 1970’s in which she was asked what the greatest experience of her career had been, and without hesitation she said, “Working with Chaplin.”

Monsieur Verdoux keeps its audience off balance, never quite settling into a groove between comedy and horror, and Chaplin as both director and actor makes his psycho almost lovable and keeps us uncertain as to just how we’re supposed to feel about him. The Production Code Administration had some weird objections to Monsieur Verdoux, including a determination to make sure Chaplin didn’t depict Verdoux as having sex with any of his bigamous victims – it was O.K. for him to kill them but he couldn’t make love with them – and the famous scene towards the end in which Verdoux, convicted of his crimes and about to be guillotined, is visited in his cell by a priest, Father Fareaux (Fritz Leiber), and, as head censor Joe Breen put it, “You constantly have Verdoux scoring off the priest.” The exchange begins with Father Fareaux telling Verdoux, “I’m here to help you make your peace with God,” and Verdoux answers, “I am at peace with God. My problems are with Man.” It ends with the priest saying, “May God have mercy on your soul,” and Verdoux firing back, “Why not? After all, it belongs to Him.” Chaplin also has Verdoux claim that next to the atrocities committed on all sides in the 20th Century’s wars, he’s a piker by comparison. “Mass killing – does not the world encourage it?” he asks in court, and later, talking to a reporter just before the priest enters, he says, “Wars, conflict – it’s all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify!” It’s hard to imagine a film with such a misanthropic and cynical attitude being a box-office hit in any era, let alone in one in which the Western world in general and the U.S. in particular was turning away from the ideals we claimed to be fighting for in World War II and towards a mindless knee-jerk patriotism and an official religiosity that increasingly defined our Cold War enemy as not just Communism, but “Godless Communism.”

Chaplin ended up as one of the most prominent scalps racked up during the McCarthy era, denied permission to re-enter the U.S. from what he had thought was just another vacation and forced into an uneasy exile in Switzerland from which he emerged just twice: to make one last anarchic masterpiece, A King in New York (1957) – a film that ends with a wish-fulfillment scene in which Chaplin turns a fire house on the House Un-American Activities Committee – and a rather lumpy film called A Countess from Hong Kong based on a story he’d written in the 1930’s with non-comedians like Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren and ‘Tippi’ Hedren in the cast. (Chaplin cast himself in a cameo role as a rail-station porter who drops a heavy trunk on his foot – the same gag he’d pulled in the 1923 film A Woman of Paris, the only other movie which Chaplin directed but did not star in.) Chaplin published an autobiography in 1965 that sold well, and in 1972 he made a triumphal return to the U.S. to accept an honorary Academy Award; the next year he won a competitive Oscar for his score for the 1952 film Limelight (which was newly eligible because it hadn’t been shown enough times in the L.A. area on its initial release to qualify), and he died quietly in his Swiss exile in 1977 (a bad year for celebrities: it also cost us Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley).