Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

(Criterion Streaming, April 2020) Charlie Chaplin’s filmography is tempered by drama and pathos throughout, but Monsieur Verdoux is an outlier even by those standards. Completely abandoning the Tramp character and leaving much of the crowd-pleasing comedy out of sight, this late-career film turns out to be a very dark thriller about a man deliberately targeting rich women for murder. There is some comedy left, but it’s dark enough to be imperceptible: Chaplin plays the murderous protagonist as a frustrated politician, explicitly making parallels between his small-scale murders and the butchery of the then-recent WW2. Monsieur Verdoux is an atypical Chaplin, but an interesting one: He’s so associated with the Tramp character than it’s easy to tire of them both, so seeing him try something radically new is a way to reinvigorate anyone’s interest in his late career, and the remarkably dark humour for its era may explain how it has withstood the test of time. Still, don’t expect too much from the result, which suffers from authorial interference: the structure feels off, all the way to a conclusion designed to teach a harsh lesson rather than offer a climax of some sort. While Chaplin has been dark in movies other than Monsieur Verdoux, he has rarely been as bleak.