THE ONLY evidence for the indictment and sentencing of Landru (whom a soft-hearted and equivocal popular mythology had promoted to the title of Sire de Gambais) and the sole exhibit that led to his conviction was a small pocket account book. In it he jotted down his expenses with meticulous, detailed conscientiousness. There was recorded, opposite the entry of each final, conjugal trip to the little Norman town where he owned a quiet country house, the cost of two railroad tickets—one a round-trip ticket and the other a one-way. Clearly, from this to an inference of premeditation was but a single step. The faux-pas cost Landru his head, and thus we see that there is a boundary beyond which method and system can place their creator in jeopardy. It was Landru’s sang-froid that was his undoing. Had he attached no greater importance to the crime than to his laundry or his grocery bill, he would perhaps have simply entered the modest expenses of his murders in some general housekeeping book. This concern for perfection in his makeup was to result in the one tiny imperfection in an otherwise perfect crime. He had either to give up the idea of a perfectly kept expense account, or waste the price of a return trip. The truth is, moreover, that Landru lacked the modicum of imagination or sensitivity that would have allowed him to pursue peacefully an honorable craftsman’s trade.
Even if there had only been this one detail to go by, we could not have compared Landru and Verdoux. A mania for keeping accounts argues a touch of meanness. The mind of Monsieur Verdoux is broader and freer. The perfect precision he brought to his crimes made it impossible to put a finger on him, but it did not rule out a touch of fantasy and of the spirit of adventure.
Besides, he played the stock exchange. No reckless entry in a cook’s notebook would cost him his head—only a financial event of world-wide importance. Almost wiped out by the Wall Street crash and devaluation, reduced to the same conditions as our luckless small investors, but still able to keep his end up, even at the cost of some skimping, Verdoux decides one night that he has had enough. The police do not arrest him—he gives himself up, and in a short while we will see how and why.
It is easy to foresee what people will find to criticize in Monsieur Verdoux. There is a fairly complete list of them in an article in La Revue des Temps Modernes which goes about as far as anything could in misrepresentation. The author of the critique expresses herself as profoundly disappointed by Chaplin’s work because to her it seems ideologically, psychologically, and aesthetically incoherent. “Monsieur Verdoux’s crimes are dictated neither by a need for self-defense nor in order to repair injustices, nor by a deep ambition, nor by the desire to improve anything in the world around him. It is a sad thing to have expended so much energy and proved absolutely nothing, to have succeeded in producing neither a comedy nor a film with social implications, and to have beclouded the most important issues.”
A remarkable misconstruction, thanks to which Monsieur Verdoux will remain a closed book to three-quarters of the public. For what have we here—a comedy or a film à thèse? Is its purpose to prove or even to explain anything? Marxists condemn Chaplin for his pessimism and for not clearly formulating the message they felt he owed them ever since the film Modern Times. Thus literary and political distortion join hands. Those in favor of a classical art with a psychological foundation find themselves in agreement with the political-minded while both are blind to the wonderful necessity of Monsieur Verdoux—that of myth.
The moment one includes Monsieur Verdoux in the Chaplin myth everything becomes clear, ordered, crystallized. Before any “character” and before the coherent, rounded-off life story that novelists and playwrights call fate, there exists a person called Charlie. He is a black-and-white form printed on the silver nitrate of film. This form is human enough to grip us and encourage our interest and sympathy. There is enough continuity of appearance and behavior about it to give its existence meaning and to attain to the autonomous existence of what is called, not without some ambiguity, “a character.” I say ambiguity because the word applies equally to a character in a novel. But Charlie is not the Princesse de Clèves. Some day a decision must be made to rid Charlie and his progressive stages of development from those extravagant comparisons with the evolution of Molière by which people felt they could honor him. A character in a novel or a play works out his destiny within the confines of one work—we must not be misled by the saga novel which is, all things considered, only a matter of size. Charlie, on the other hand, always transcends the films in which he appears.
André Malraux recounts how, somewhere one Arabian night, he saw the most marvelous Chaplin film projected onto a white wall where sleeping cats lay: an odd serpent pieced out of second-hand strips of film picked up here and there. The myth was manifested there in its purest form.
It is Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse rather than Moliére’s Misanthrope or Tartuffe who can throw light on the existence of Charlie. It is true that the cinema, like the comic strip, vaudeville, the circus, or the commedia dell’arte, has heroes standardized in appearance and possessing definite characteristics whom the public likes to see week by week in adventures which, for all their variety, are always those of the same person. However, I think we should avoid a too hasty and superficial comparison. We must first establish hierarchies in the degree and form of their existence. One cannot really speak of myth short of an understanding and development of characters. Charlie was a product of the Mack Sennett comedies, in which he had a smaller role than Fatty Arbuckle; but there was an exceptional depth to him, the appeal of a special kind of credibility, a consistency of behavior that owed nothing to psychology or to physical abnormality, a magical radiance in his glance differentiating him from the marionettes that surrounded him—and all of this foreshadowed a special destiny. In less than fifteen years, the little fellow with the ridiculous cut-away coat, the little trapezoid moustache, the cane, and the bowler hat, had become part of the consciousness of mankind. Never since the world began had a myth been so universally accepted.
I have no desire to undertake the exegesis of this myth, which would require a dismayingly large number of references ranging from the personal psychoanalysis of Charles Spencer Chaplin to universal symbolism, by way of Jewish mythology and various hypotheses about contemporary civilization. I doubt, with so short a historical perspective to go by, whether we can yet form a coherent and over-all view of Charlie. Condensed in him, as the psychoanalysts say, is too much sensitivity: too many collective unconsciousnesses are stored up inside him, providing opportunities for secret and powerful interassimilations, for formidable stratified mythological overlays, for archetypal upheavals, for mutations of meaning as yet beyond our grasp. But it is sufficient for my purpose to point out in Charlie a few constant factors, and also a few of the variants: to follow along paths taken by his character and to suggest, in the absence of a master key, three or four clues that are generally acceptable. I will be at pains above all not to lose sight of the fact that we are faced with a mythological process and to order my criticism accordingly.
If Verdoux has a “meaning,” why look for it in terms of some moral, political, or social ideology or other, or even in reference to psychological categories that we are in the habit of seeing as revealed in the characters of our theater or our novels, when it is so easy to discover it in Charlie?
The critic quoted above attacks Chaplin’s performance, accusing him of failing to escape altogether from the comic format of his former character, of hesitating, not choosing one way or another, between the realistic interpretation that the role of Verdoux demands and the conventions of a “Charlie.” The fact is that in this instance realism would add up to illusion. Charlie is always there as if superimposed on Verdoux, because Verdoux is Charlie. It is important that at the right moment the public should recognize him without any shadow of a doubt; and this wonderful moment arrives in the final shot when Verdoux, alias Charlie, goes off in shirtsleeves between the executioners. Verdoux, or Charlie disguised as his opposite! There is no feature of the former character that is not turned inside out like the fingers of a glove. No ridiculous cutaway, no bowler, no outsize boots, no bamboo cane, rather a dapper suit, a broad, gray, silk tie, a soft felt hat, a gold-handled cane. The tiny trapezoid moustache, his supremely distinctive mark, has disappeared. The social positions of Charlie and Verdoux are radically different: Charlie, even when he is a millionaire, remains the eternal beggar; Verdoux is a rich man. When it is Charlie’s moment to marry, it is always with dreadful termagants who terrorize him and squeeze the last penny of his pay out of him. The polygamous Verdoux is always unfaithful to his wives, forces them into submission, murders them, and lives off their money (except for the young woman in ill health and the one he decides not to poison—but we will deal with these exceptions later).
Furthermore, Charlie obviously has an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the opposite sex while Verdoux plays Don Juan and succeeds at it. The Charlie of The Gold Rush is soft-hearted and naïve; Verdoux is a cynic. No matter into how many elements you break Charlie down there is not one whose opposite you will not find in Verdoux.
Let us sum up all these characteristics in a single one. Charlie is essentially a socially unadapted person; Verdoux is superadapted. By reversing the character, the whole Chaplin universe is turned upside down at one stroke. The relations of Charlie with society (along with women, the fundamental and permanent theme of his work) have all switched their value. For example the police who terrorize Charlie are easily tricked by Verdoux. Far from running from the cops, Verdoux eludes them without having to stay out of their way, and when the game has gone on long enough and he decides to give himself up to one or more of them, it will be the police who are scared. But the scene is worth recounting. One night, Verdoux, aging and penniless, meets the young girl he had spared and even helped out of a difficult spot. Grateful to him and anxious on her part to do him a good turn, she takes him into a cabaret. She is now a rich woman, married to an arms manufacturer—a sweet man in spite of that, she says. Is it this final disappointment, is it weariness, or does he think that the time has arrived to put an end to it all? Verdoux pretends with friendly sincerity to accept the help offered him but after leaving the young woman he returns to the nightclub where, in passing, he had spotted the relatives of one of his victims. They have recognized him. He knows they have telephoned the police and that in a minute or two they will arrive. It would be easy to summon a taxi, but instead he returns calmly and finds himself face to face with the enemy, an old woman and her nephew. He does a quick feint and manages to lock them in an alcove near the cloakroom. The police arrive on the scene, a crowd starts to form in front of the locked door through which we can hear shouting. The police stand there open-mouthed, and alongside them is Verdoux, who could still escape without attracting attention. But no. He remains, curious and impassive. The door is forced open but there is naturally no murderer inside. The terrified old woman, half-fainting, comes to her senses—face to face with Verdoux. She faints away a second time, this time into Verdoux’s arms while he, embarrassed, hands her to a cop. The scene is repeated several times until finally, overcoming her fright, the old lady manages to denounce him, indicating him with her finger. Paralyzed with astonishment, the incredulous policeman asks, “Could you be Monsieur Verdoux?” “At your service,” he replies, giving a little bow. Before hastening to handcuff him, the representative of law and order wavers and hesitates, himself within an ace of fainting.
Let the reader put himself, for a moment, in the policeman’s place. From the instant Charlie was born (yet how can you measure his existence by time?) society has directed its police force to drive him out of its bosom. The cops have been used to charging after him at street corners, on deserted wharfs, in public squares after closing time. His awkward and precipitous flight has always indicated a vague sense of self-confessed guilt, the condign punishment for which, moreover, is a blow from a truncheon. Actually this little fellow with the ducklike waddle gives them little trouble. His mischievousness and artfulness drive him to nothing more than harmless little acts of revenge or to the minimum of petty thefts necessary for survival. He was an easy victim who always eluded them at the last moment but always recognized his guilt. Then suddenly Charlie disappears! No more recognition of guilt! Now it is society that is inflicted with a strange uneasiness: not of course that it feels guilty, or at least it won’t admit to being guilty (that we have never seen, for society by its nature can only accuse others.) But finally something abnormal is happening in its bosom which causes it to be far more disturbed than by the disorder that it ordinarily sanctions. The women who disappear, and this elusive character to whom, if he exists, these monstrous and incomprehensible crimes must be attributed, disturb its conscience as a society—not because it is unable to prevent and punish them, but chiefly because they are of such a kind that society vaguely senses their ambiguity. It reacts emotionally with a holy wrath, and this already indicates a troubled subconscious. Society knows it is guilty but cannot acknowledge the fact. When Monsieur Verdoux explains to the tribunal that all he has done is to apply, down to the last detail, the fundamental law of social relationships, the received wisdom of modern life that “business is business,” society of course covers its face and cries scandal, and all the louder because the point has gone home. Its attack on Monsieur Verdoux will be all the more savage because it refuses to see in him a parody of society, an application ad absurdum of its rules of the game. Contrary to K in The Trial (and Charlie is not unrelated to him) Verdoux by his existence renders society guilty. It does not know what of exactly, but so long as this element of scandal survives in its bosom, the world will be sick and troubled. Unfortunately for society, Verdoux knows the game so well that he profits by it to remain out of reach. He can push audacity to the point of gazing in curiosity over the shoulder of the policeman who is looking for him. The fright of the poor official as he turns around is understandable.
Naturally society condemns Verdoux to death. In this way it hopes to be rid of the whole business, to wipe away totally the shocking stain on its existence. But it cannot see that, if Verdoux has deigned to hand himself over to justice, it is because the verdict can no longer touch him—better still, it will even deal itself a blow through him. From the moment of his arrest, Verdoux is totally indifferent to his fate. The limits of irony are passed when he is visited in prison by a journalist and a priest and asks the latter if there is anything he can do for him. All these final scenes are unspeakably beautiful, not so much from perfection of dramatic form but essentially because of the power of the situation and of the character itself. Verdoux presides over his last hours like a Socrates and, less talkative than Socrates, he holds society at bay by the mere fact of his presence. Society performs its final rite—the cigarette, the glass of rum, but Verdoux neither smokes nor drinks. He refuses this ill-timed offer with a mechanical gesture. Then follows one of Chaplin’s most brilliant gags, a brain wave of genuis. He changes his mind. “I have never tasted rum!” he says, and with an air of curiosity he tastes it. The next instant there shines through Verdoux’s fugitive and bright glance, the awareness of death. Not fear, or courage, or resignation—certainly this elementary psychology comes into play—but something like a passivity of will which combines all the gravity of the moment with something that transcends indifference, contempt, even the certainty of revenge. He alone has known for a long time what lay ahead for society. He does not interfere with it. Now all has been accomplished.
We see Verdoux next being led away across the prison yard in the dawn, between two executioners. A small man in his shirt sleeves, his arms tied behind him, he moves forward toward the scaffold with a kind of a hop, skip, and a jump. Then comes the sublimest gag of all, unspoken but unmistakable, the gag that resolves the whole film: Verdoux was Charlie! They’re going to guillotine Charlie! The fools did not recognize him. In order to force society to commit this irreparable blunder, Charlie has decked out the simulacrum of his opposite. In the precise and mythological meaning of the word, Verdoux is just an avatar of Charlie—the chief and we may indeed say the first. As a result Monieur Verdoux is undoubtedly the most important of Chaplin’s works. When we see it, we are seeing the first evolution of a step which could well be, by the same token, the final step. Monsieur Verdoux casts a new light on Chaplin’s world, sets it right and gives it a new significance. This same road to nowhere, always taken from film to film by the little fellow with the cane, which some see as the road of the wandering Jew while others prefer to identify it with the road of hope—now we know where it ends. It ends as a path across a prison yard in the morning mist, through which we sense the ridiculous shape of a guillotine.
Let there be no mistake, the scandal created by the film in the United States could well take as a pretext the obvious immorality of the character. The truth is that society reacted to it: it sensed something implacable, like a menace, in the serenity of Verdoux’s death. It guessed, to tell the whole truth, that Charlie at one and the same time was triumphant over it and escaped its clutches, that he has put society forever in the wrong; for it is not enough to say that the road ends in the scaffold: through one of his most beautiful ellipses, Chaplin avoided showing us the finale. The blade of the guillotine will only cut up an apparition. We seem to guess at the existence of a double of the executed man: dressed in a white tunic, decked out with the fluffy paper wings he wore in the dream sequence of The Kid, Charlie escapes by superimposition, unknown to the executioners. Even before the ludicrous deed is accomplished, Charlie is in heaven.
I amuse myself imagining Charlie’s final avatar, his ultimate adventure: the settling of his account with St. Peter—even if I were God the Father, I would not feel at ease welcoming Monsieur Verdoux.
Monsieur Verdoux is Chaplin’s New Testament. The Old ended with The Gold Rush and The Circus. Between the two, the Chaplin myth seems to be confused, troubled, uncertain. He is still trying to rely on gags and comic bits which, however, grow fewer and fewer. The Great Dictator is significant from this point of view. Although badly constructed, mixed up, oddly assorted, it did have one brilliant and fortuitous justification, a settling of accounts with Hitler, who well deserved it, for his two-fold impudence of stealing Charlie’s moustache and of raising himself to the rank of the gods. In obliging Hitler’s moustache to become again part of the Charlie myth, Charlie wiped out the myth of the dictator. The film had to be made, even if only for the sake of our mental satisfaction and of the due ordering of things, but it was a chance variant in the avatars of the hero. Besides, we clearly see a disintegration of the character in The Great Dictator, especially in one scene, at once the worst dramatically and in its conformity with the phenomenology of the myth the most beautiful: I refer to the final speech. In this interminable, yet (in my view) too short scene I remember only the spellbinding tone of a voice and the most disconcerting of metamorphoses. Charlie’s lunar mask disappears little by little, corroded by the gradations of the panchromatic stock and betrayed by the nearness of the camera, which intensifies the telescopic effect of the wide screen. Underneath, as if it were a superimposition, appears the face of an already aging man, furrowed here and there by grief, his hair sprinkled with white, the face of Charles Spencer Chaplin. The photographic psychoanalysis of Charlie, as it were, remains certainly one of the great moments in world cinema.
All the same, and indeed by its very beauty, it reveals an unhealthy condition of the myth, a pernicious infection of the character, which, if it continued, could not but destroy it utterly. Indeed, one might have expected, with some likelihood, to find nothing more in Monsieur Verdoux than the actor (prodigious undoubtedly, but still the actor) Charles S. Chaplin. Nothing of the sort, it was just that sickly condition which precedes moulting and the shedding of skins. Charlie was getting ready to shed his skin. Like Jupiter planning one of his naughty escapades here on earth, he was to return to us unrecognizable and beget on society one of those children she would remember.
What is admirable about Monsieur Verdoux is that his activities have a much deeper significance than those of Charlie in The Gold Rush although they are of a completely opposite kind. Actually, from the first Keystone shorts to The Gold Rush and The Circus Charlie’s character has passed through a moral and psychological evolution. The initial Charlie is rather naughty, kicking out right and left at the backsides of his rivals as soon as they are no longer in a position to retaliate.
In Kid Auto Races at Venice we see him bite the nose of an inquisitive bystander without the slightest warning. The character gradually improves but it is touch and go for a long while. Before the maternal instinct he reveals in The Kid (and it is only after he has done his best to get rid of him, that he decides to adopt the little Jackie Coogan) he has shown little sympathy for children. In A Day’s Pleasure, taking advantage of the absence of witnesses, one of those little backward kicks that are his specialty sends flying the mint lozenges and the acid drops that the ship’s bellboy offers him. Besides, it is a regular rule of conduct with him not to hesitate to do some mean little thing when no one is looking. He shams easily and is tricky to no good purpose. It would be wrong to think that Charlie is basically good. Only love makes him so, and then there are no limits to his generosity and courage. In Easy Street and even in The Pilgrim we find more than one example of his naughtiness. However, these faults of his do not detract from our interest in the character or from our sympathy. In fact, the opposite is true. These words must be dissociated from any implied moral judgment. Being on the side of the hero of a myth, the fact that we are both for and with him, fortunately is not uniquely dependent on the moral categories of which he may be the embodiment. But it is a law common to the evolution of all characters that live by virtue of intercourse with the public, that they tend to justify our sympathy for them by greater psychological consistency and greater moral perfection. The character of Pierrot follows the same curve. Thus it is that in The Gold Rush Charlie has become completely good. His misfortunes never come under the stricture of moral condemnation. On the contrary, they make a victim out of him and stir us on occasions to something beyond sympathy, namely to pity. Here Charlie is at the end of a process of evolution that justifies our coming to the conclusion that it does not represent his work at its best. As far as I am concerned, I would rather have the rich equivocation of The Pilgrim in which his art has not yet troubled about, or become enfeebled by, a concern for psychological and moral values. In any event, The Gold Rush is the most forceful apology for the character and most clearly calls for us to revolt against Charlie’s fate.
The Saint Verdoux of today is the dialectical answer to Saint Charlie of The Kid, The Circus, and The Gold Rush. But in my view the indictment of Charlie’s enemies and the vindication provided by the character are all the more convincing because they are not based on any psychological proof. We go along with Verdoux, we are for Verdoux. But how can our sympathy be based on our moral estimate of him? On that level the spectator too could only condemn Verdoux’s cynicism. Yet we take him as he is. It is the character that we love, not his qualities or his defects. The audience’s sympathy for Verdoux is focused on the myth, not on what he stands for morally. So when Verdoux, with the spectator on his side, is condemned by society, he is doubly sure of victory because the spectator condemns the condemnation of a man “justly” condemned by society. Society no longer has any emotional claim on the public conscience.
Monsieur Verdoux is at once a paradox and a tour de force. The Gold Rush went straight for its goal. Verdoux takes society in the rear like a boomerang; his triumph is in no way indebted to the ready and dubious help of ethics. The myth is self-sufficient, it convinces by its own inner logic. There are some theorems in geometry whose truth is only finally established when their opposites have been proved. Monsieur Verdoux is needed to fill out and round off Chaplin’s work. Between the timid and unhappy lover of The Gold Rush and this Don Juan past his prime, society is completely caught up in the dialectic of the myth. The reflex action with which it imprudently tried to get rid of the myth released the final spring of the trap. Feeling morally and legally justified in condemning Bluebeard to death while it had been satisfied only to jail the naïve striker of Modern Times, lo and behold society killed Charlie!
It now remains to be explained precisely why Chaplin chose for his daring act of defiance against society an assault on women. I have reserved until now this aspect of the myth which I consider to be more personal and biographical.
To begin with, this polygamous speculator harbors a touching secret: he has a wife, a child, a hearth and home. It is in large part to supply their needs and to keep them in quiet comfort that he is forever, up hill and down dale, in the process of poisoning someone. His wife, his first and only one, has become an invalid. She is frail and gentle. We learn, at the end of the film, from the mouth of the aged Verdoux, just before he surrenders to the police, that she and the child are dead. Naturally we have no proof that he didn’t poison them. From the way he adds that they are certainly “happier up above,” we might even think he did. At bottom how differently could he have treated this wife whom he loved than by killing her for love rather than for her money as he did the others? Verdoux has no prejudices about death; he knows what’s good about it and doesn’t hesitate to choose it when that’s the wise thing to do. It may be that, financially ruined, weary of the struggle and no longer able to assure a peaceful existence for the one he loved, or perhaps knowing that her suffering was incurable, he had gently spared her the propinquity of a world against which he could no longer defend her.
The second exception is a young women he met in the street and brought home one night to try out a new poison he had just concocted. The young woman, believing him a good man, confides her misfortunes to him. She wants to come to the help of the man she loves. She believes in life because she believes in this man’s love. She is battling despair with all her might so as to save him. Touched, Verdoux exchanges the poison for a glass of burgundy, and presses two thousand-franc notes into the unhappy girl’s hand. When, at the end of the film, he comes across her a second time, she might have been of more effective help to him. It is not so much material help that Verdoux now needs—it is not even love. Tenderness, affection, would be enough. But he must also be able to believe in the happiness of this woman whose husband, who makes her so happy, is after all, he now learns, just a munitions maker like the rest of them. If that night he had met only one just person, a single woman who really deserved her happiness, perhaps he would have done society a favor and decided not to surrender himself into the hands of its justice.
Even under the guise of Verdoux-Bluebeard, Charlie follows and perfects his personal myth of the woman whom we may here call (in remembrance of her first embodiment) the Edna Purviance complex. At this point I will put forward a hypothesis which does not claim to be all inclusive but which seems at least to explain some aspects of the character of Verdoux in its relation both to Charlie and to Chaplin. There is no need to have recourse to the latest subtleties of psychoanalysis to see quite evidently that Chaplin, by way of Charlie, pursues symbolically one and the same feminine myth. Between the tender and gentle Edna Purviance, the blind girl of City Lights, and Verdoux’s frail invalid there is no noticeable difference except that Verdoux is married to the last named. Like Charlie, they are all unhappy human beings, ill adjusted to society, physical or moral invalids of social life. It is this hyperfemininity which beguiles Charlie; love’s lightning stroke is the cause of a shattering conversion to the norms of society and morality. At the beginning of Easy Street, naturally it is not the pastor’s sermon but his daughter’s smile that transforms the miscreant into an instrument of virtue. There is one exception to the rule: The Kid in which pseudo-paternal love takes the place of love for a pure young girl. If we correctly interpret the symbolism of these female characters then the whole of Charlie’s work would be the ever-renewed search for the woman capable of reconciling him to society and by the same token to himself. The public, remembering only Charlie’s kindness and goodness, remembers only a Charlie in love. They forget that the winnings he offers to the young immigrant girl were gained by cheating during the game. In Modern Times Charlie dreams of living an honest and industrious life in which he returns in the evening to his petty-bourgeois house with a good feeling of a day well spent, and finds the little woman he loves busy getting dinner ready. Love alone can prompt his desire, albeit blundering and comic for other reasons, not only to adapt himself to society but one might even say to accept a moral way of living and a psychological individualism. For the sake of Edna Purviance Charlie feels capable of assuming a character and a destiny: the myth becomes a man.
In relation to this combination of events, found in almost all Charlie movies, Verdoux represents likewise an important development. Depending on the case, a film may end, as in The Pilgrim, with the collapse of the idyll, or, as in The Gold Rush or The Immigrant, with marriage. The fact is, though, that the upbeat dénouement should not be taken seriously. It is brought about—and on this point a comparison with Molière is possible—by a dramatic reflex that is foreign to the myth. The true ending, which the audience unconsciously reconstructs, is that of Sunnyside or of Modern Times; though again one might consider this absence of a dénouement to be an optimistic development of the undeniable failures of love in The Pilgrim or The Circus.
For the first time in Monsieur Verdoux, we see Charlie after his marriage to Edna Purviance. Maybe because he has rounded the cape of love that, at least according to the logic of the myth, Charlie can change himself into Verdoux, or perhaps, if you prefer, Verdoux simply had to be married to Edna Purviance. In any case, although he is not all that reconciled to society, he at least knows how to make use of it. We also know, and this is important, that he continues to respect the wife-child myth but no longer hopes to be saved by it. Maybe, supposing we accept the murder theory, he respects the myth even to the point of poisoning Edna Purviance to prevent her from becoming the responsibility of life and society.
The second young woman to be spared might conceivably represent a more vital Edna Purviance, who refuses to die. But without knowing it, she crosses over into the opposite camp.
We are now left with those other women, the ones who can be poisoned, and also those who resist on occasion—for the most important character in the film is precisely the woman Verdoux does not manage to kill. Chaplin, whom one can criticize after his recent films for his increasing fear of talented actors, has made a fortunate choice here in Martha Raye, the unspeakably comic termagant, the clinging woman of so many American comedies. By asking a well-known actress, one already established in a continuing role, to play opposite him, Charlie whether he knew it or not wanted to set a character rather than an actor over against Verdoux. Hollywood’s number-one pain in the neck, the nagging Martha Raye, who could make wild beasts out of lambs and justify the acquittal of a dozen Bluebeards, is precisely the one indestructible woman whose capacity for resistance Verdoux cannot overcome. I am impressed by the fact that Chaplin did not hesitate to seize on a mythology foreign to his own and used a character that up to this point owed nothing to him, but who will henceforth owe him everything.
It is Martha Raye who vindicates Verdoux in the viewer’s mind. The one murder that Chaplin deals with at length (and cleverly too) is that of a harridan—and what’s more, he fluffs it. The whole middle part of the film is taken up by one gag of formidable dimensions, and droll beyond words: the poisoning that didn’t come off. The others are handled so artfully in line with the Chaplin technique that our sensibilities, skillfully manipulated, feel no sense of repugnance over Verdoux’s activities. It is Bluebeard, instead, for whom one feels sorry. Thus he manages to have his revenge on women without having to sacrifice his splendid role of victim.
For here it is also doubtless a question of revenge. While Monsieur Verdoux extends and goes beyond the myth, hitherto incomplete, of pure love for Edna Purviance, Chaplin gives Verdoux the task of revenging him on the other women. It might well be true to say that Charlie’s feminine ideal is more or less consciously Chaplin’s own. I would be ready to see clear indications of this in his use of these new loves of his, succeeding Edna Purviance in the embodiment of the myth. But in private life reality customarily gives the lie to mythological idealization. Objectively speaking, the faults of the woman or of Chaplin himself are of little importance here. It is reasonable to assume that they are there simply to justify consciously a divorce which was unconsciously inevitable from the beginning of the idyll. If it is the female myth not the woman that Chaplin is in search of, then no single woman can satisfy him, and his disappointment is all the keener in proportion as the “crystallization” of his initial feeling has caused him subjectively to identify his new love with the ideal. “The thirteenth woman returns as the first.”
The discarded wife is not just a wife one no longer loves—she is expelled from the myth. For Chaplin-Charlie (Charlie being here Chaplin’s unconscious) she has betrayed the Edna Purviance whom Chaplin saw in her. Thus all women are guilty save one—who will join the others later. The myth of Don Juan is merged with that of Bluebeard. One may consider Verdoux’s murder victims to be symbols of Chaplin’s former wives, who were likewise his wives on the screen. Not to mention that Chaplin symbolically recoups, through Monsieur Verdoux, the alimony extorted from him with the complicity of American society and the law by various “Edna Purviances” who turned into “Martha Rayes” after divorcing him.
For it was public opinion that first took upon itself to make a Bluebeard out of Chaplin, even before he created Monsieur Verdoux. The author of A Woman of Paris (known in French as L’Opinion publique) was content to face up to the myth in which he was already imprisoned, freeing himself from it by fulfilling it and justifying it symbolically. The misogyny of Chaplin finds in Verdoux both the judge and the executioner of women. But they deserve to die because all, to one degree or another, are guilty of betraying the hope embodied in Edna Purviance.
What could be the meaning of the formal aesthetic problems of the narrative and the direction if, as I have tried to show, the reality of the work resides in the symbolism of the situation and the characters? It’s clear that we cannot here apply the usual criteria of cinematic dramaturgy. Obviously Chaplin does not build the substance of his narrative on the basis of a skeletal scenario, of an abstract dramatic structure, even the very substantial one of tragedy. It is this that may set one on the wrong track or deceive one in analyzing his films. They are only sequences of quasi-autonomous scenes, each of which is content to exploit a situation to the full. Think back to what you can remember of Charlie, and dozens of scenes will come to mind as clear cut as the picture of the character himself; but whether we are dealing with the gas lamp in Easy Street, the sermon on David and Goliath, the papier-maché tree in Shoulder Arms, the dance of the rolls, Charlie’s capers when he is being beaten up on the sidewalk in The Great Dictator, the dream in The Kid, or twenty other scenes, all are sufficient unto themselves, smooth and round like an egg, so that one might almost extrapolate them from one film to another. Certainly it would be a mistake to put all of Chaplin’s work on the same level. The dramatic progression of The Pilgrim, for example, is admirable, that of Easy Street enchantingly clear, but Shoulder Arms is divided into three distinct parts which constitute, dramatically, independent films. Even in the best-made of his films the so-called structural qualities are the most extrinsic to them, the last by which we would determine their excellence. Of course it would have been better if Chaplin had known how to reconcile the dramatic development of a story with the development of the situations of which it is composed, even better still, if this useful ordering of succession and interrelation conveyed a more hidden order in the conceiving and developing of a gag, and, most of all, that mysterious economy which gives the scenes, however short, their spiritual density, their specific gravity as myth and as comedy. The only serious formal criticisms that can be leveled against a Chaplin film concern its unity of style, the unfortunate variations in tone, the conflicts in the symbolism implicit in the situations. From this point of view the quality of Chaplin’s films since The Gold Rush has definitely fallen off. Despite some first-rate scenes, even Modern Times suffers from an evident lack of unity between gags.*
As for The Great Dictator, it is a collection of uneven scenes; some of them, like the one with the artillery shell, might even pass for mediocre reminders of the Keystone days. The grenade gag could have fitted right into Shoulder Arms. I don’t think much of the meeting between the two dictators, which introduces a tired old custard-pie routine into a work that contains scenes of sheer dramatic tension such as the one in which Charlie sits and watches his house burn down. In this scene, as Jean-Louis Barrault has said, the mime of despair, the choreography of anguish, find their most perfect expression in immobility.
As a rule, this falling off in quality in Chaplin’s next to last films is attributed to a parasitic ideology. As we know, Chaplin has some pretensions to being a social philosopher, and no injustice is done to the artist to find his ideas, though appealing, also an encumbrance. Clearly Easy Street, or for that matter The Gold Rush, do not set out to prove anything, while there is no mistaking the purpose or theses of Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and Monsieur Verdoux. We could willingly do without these; but it remains to determine if they are as important as has been alleged. In proportion as any “message” animates a character, to that extent it displaces the myth and tends to displace the character too. The ontology of the hero is destroyed. But thank God this destruction does not follow as inevitably as one might suppose. The myth resists; harassed and constrained by Chaplin’s ideas, it finds in the genius of Chaplin himself a way to escape from them, and to reappear elsewhere, perhaps even without Chaplin being aware of it. But the symbolism of the character is more complicated; we have to separate it from the relations between the character and the situation, and also from the relation between the character and the message. Almost every gesture, an unexpected sign of some sort, informs us that Charlie is at last ready to treat the idea itself as a prop, an object of some sort to be introduced into the performance. The globe in The Great Dictator is a good example: a symbol of an idea of the most general kind, it becomes a choreographic prop in the development of a scene where we return to Charlie’s 1916 sense of the comic. It is his way of juggling with ideas even when they are the ideas of citizen Chaplin.
But Monsieur Verdoux does not even need any such justification as that provided by the group of arguments I am presuming to offer in defense of the “accused.” It is difficult to know what Chaplin’s ideological intentions were in conceiving this film but they have in no sense interfered with the character since his behavior in the situations in which he finds himself is thoroughly autonomous, coherent, and meaningful. Hence it would be more correct to blame this on the weakening of the myth since the making of The Gold Rush rather than the proliferation of parasitic ideology in the scenarios of Charles Spencer Chaplin. It would be senseless to imagine and to hope retrospectively for a prolongation of the Charlie character, arbitrarily established at a level which we happen to believe to be a satisfactory stage of its evolution. The hero created by Chaplin was dependent on many factors, as various as they were decisive. The transition from orthochromatic stock to panchromatic should itself alone have brought on a veritable morphological disorder, more serious perhaps than even the introduction of the spoken word: acknowledging and revealing that the actor was aging, it ate away at the character. Try and imagine Charlie in Technicolor! But we must also take into consideration the general history of the cinema, its technical evolution, the increasing sensitivity of the public, and, above all, Charlie’s own life story, which we have taken to be not unconnected with the mythology of his character. On the contrary, one might be delighted at the metamorphosis of Charlie into Verdoux so long as the latter fits in with the rebirth of a myth able to secrete anew its ideological antitoxins.
So far from being badly put together, Monsieur Verdoux strikes me as one of Chaplin’s best-made films, thanks to the new-found vigor of the character, to the homogeneity of the myth. Jean Renoir made no mistake. He was doubtless the only person in Hollywood able to appreciate its structure, completely built from within, a thoroughly workmanlike job. Renoir himself has never been able to “construct” a scenario and for basically the same reasons. Renoir has always been more concerned with the creation of characters and situations in which they could express themselves rather than with a story. There is also a Renoir mythology—obviously more diffused and spread out over many more characters—as La Règle du jeu clearly shows: the only reason for the bearskin was to provide the author-actor with an opportunity to achieve the metempsychosis of which he dreamed. Let the scenarios cope with the bearskins! I have no wish to push the comparison too far, since this could falsify the meaning of Renoir’s work, into which quite other aesthetic contradictions enter. Yet it remains true that the director of La Partie de campagne likewise has always tried to direct the film in which the narrative would flow from the characters in a given situation. Each scene in La Règle du jeu is resolved on its own terms. We feel that it presented itself to the director as a special case. He treats it like an autonomous organism, as the gardener treats his rose bush. It gives me great pleasure to find a garden and roses in both Monsieur Verdoux and Diary of a Chambermaid. These images are not accidental, for Renoir lights up his film with the same cheerful cruelty.
We must not conclude, therefore, that Chaplin’s film has no formal structure, no narrative architecture, and that the direction consists in nothing more than setting up situations. Just the opposite, in fact. To recall what film direction owes not only to A Woman of Paris but to Charlie’s work as a whole is to repeat a truism. Monsieur Verdoux shows its originality precisely in achieving a kind of synthesis between the celebrated psychological film directed by Chaplin and the films in which Charlie appears. Whereby we clearly see that the technique of ellipsis and allusion which was the definitive aesthetic revelation of A Woman of Paris somehow naturally befits the character. Chaplin’s method of direction consists in carrying Charlie’s performance over into the camerawork, the shooting script, and the editing. But Chaplin’s ellipsis, whether applied to space or time, is not really concerned with what we call the scenario. It only affects the narrative at the scene level in immediate relation to the actor within the structure of the situation. It would be impossible to think of a closer dependence of content and form, or, better, a more perfect fusion of the two. Ellipsis gives definition to the aesthetic crystallization of Chaplin’s work. But in this connection, Monsieur Verdoux is undoubtedly the most completely crystallized film of all. Although one can complain that the majority of the Charlie films are a succession of more or less perfect but relatively disordered scenes, the “cleavage planes” within Monsieur Verdoux are in some way homothetic to the much smaller units of ellipsis. Their interdependence is much more apparent than real. These dramatic crystals, when you bring them together, fit into one another. As we know, Monsieur Verdoux contains some of Chaplin’s most perfect ellipses. I already mentioned the one of the guillotine we do not see. We are familiar with the furnace and its black smoke in the rose garden, or the killing of the woman indicated just by Verdoux’s going into and coming out of the bridal chamber. But these ellipses scaled to actor and scene have their counterparts in the enormous gaps separating the sequences. To go from one to the other by way of an explanatory title indicating the year and the place where the next action unfolds is just a pseudo-awkwardness as normal in a plot of this kind as a little placard indicating the setting in the Shakespearean theater. As for the train shot which introduces various sequences and provides the film with an interior rhythm like a leitmotif, it reaches a level almost of abstraction, so tightly does it condense time and events into a single image.
What could mislead us about the formal qualities of Monsieur Verdoux and make us consider it less well made than, for example, The Gold Rush (whereas it is certainly more perfectly made) is a natural confusion in the spectator between the comic density of the film and the myth. Whenever one thinks of Charlie, he is inseparable from the comic routines with which he won over the public. Since The Gold Rush, there has been a sharp decline in the wealth of Chaplin’s comic imagination. There is more inventiveness, there are more gags in three hundred feet of The Pilgrim than in all of his last four films. There is certainly no room here for congratulation. On the other hand, neither should we harbor any resentment against Chaplin, nor interpret the fact as necessarily indicating an aesthetic impoverishment. Rather, everything takes place in Monsieur Verdoux as if this undeniable draining of his comic genius was the price to be paid for, or perhaps the cause of, an increased refinement of the myth. The middle part of Monsieur Verdoux is lightened by a monstrous gag, the sturdy comic bulk of which testifies, to our delight, that it belongs to the geological strata of the good old Charlie films; but the business with the glass of rum, and especially the final image of the film, have a quality, a finesse, a purity, which is only found three or four times in all of Chaplin’s work. I don’t think one has to ask oneself if this collapse or erosion of Chaplin’s comic genius is compensated for by an enriching of the myth. We have here two aesthetic values, incomparable in their richness. I think it is wiser to presume the existence here of some mysterious aesthetic necessity and (since I have plunged into geographical metaphors) to see in Monseur Verdoux the work nearest to that equilibrium profile in which the myth, like a river flowing effortlessly and without hindrance to the sea, deposits no more than a fine carpet of silt and of gold dust.
* The commercial reissue of Modern Times has given me an opportunity to quash this judgment, which was based on memory. Today, indeed, I am almost ready to claim Modern Times as one of the best of Charlie’s full-length films—perhaps the best, along with City Lights.
So far from lacking unity, Modern Times on the contrary is the film in which the level of acting style is best maintained, controlling thus the style of the gags and even of the script. The ideological significance never impinges from without on the comic flow of the gags. It is the imperturbable logic of the latter that utterly exposed the absurdities of our society.