Monsieur Verdoux.

In the New York Times, J Hoberman recounts the history of the critical reception of Monsieur Verdoux, from its polarizing debut in 1947 to its slow revival in the 60s - and again now, as it screens at Film Forum for a week, beginning on Friday: "Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one. As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940), he would now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he feared would follow. 'Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy,' Chaplin told an interviewer. 'Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business.' But Monsieur Verdoux was also the logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a man."

Updated through 6/18.

"Having been served little, sour gags where fat guffaws were expected, critics panned the movie, most judging that Chaplin had forsaken entertainment to become a Cause; still, others saw a mature artist working with kamikaze mettle," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "Those two views are not mutually exclusive."

Seattle's Northwest Film Forum will be screening Verdoux next month and suggests in the meantime "picking up a copy of Agee on Film and reading his three part defense, one of the only published at the time."

Updates: Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine: "'Don't believe too much,' Verdoux advises. 'This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.' A sentiment that perhaps The Tramp would have agreed with, but only up to a point: whereas in City Lights The Tramp goes so far as to risk his life in a boxing match to raise money for the woman he loves, would the same man ever go so far as to murder for love, as in Verdoux?"

"It is a masterpiece," insists Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "See it."

Updates, 6/12: "It may be difficult for contemporary audiences to see either the scandal or the classic in Monsieur Verdoux (written and directed by Chaplin, from an idea by Orson Welles) - it's difficult for me, quite frankly - but it's worth the effort," argues Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a stagy, self-conscious and erratic production that suffers from awkward editing and peculiar shot selection, and for viewers unused to Chaplin as a speaking actor (or unused to him at all) his high-pitched voice and mannered, almost limp-wristed portrayal of a serial killer is likely to be off-putting. I know all this is heretical, film buffs, but it's better to get it into the open. If you want to argue that Monsieur Verdoux is an important movie for people to see in 2008 (and I do), you have to acknowledge the obstacles it presents."

"The fact remains that, in spite of its admirable daring, the primary value of the film is Chaplin's own self-abnegation, and this is simply not enough to make a gestalt on its own," writes Evan Kindley in Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "What we are left with is an oddity, and an accomplishment, but not an achievement. No one else could have played Monsieur Verdoux but Charlie Chaplin; but the suspicion remains that someone else - Welles, perhaps? - could have made a better Chaplin film." A recommended read.

Updates, 6/13: "[T]he tonal mix natural to the Bluebeard DNA wasn't what doomed Chaplin's strange film — that would be Verdoux's mordant concluding monologue, judging his exploits as par for the course in a world of amoral nihilism and violence," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

"There are few comedies as resoundingly defiant as Monsieur Verdoux," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "Harshly received at the time, it is now impossible not to see it as anything other than career commentary, revealing a verbally excoriating (though no less dandified) Chaplin implicitly connecting the dots between entertaining the masses and making a killing."

Update, 6/18: "Chaplin's initial forays into the world of sound film display his talent as a composer of distinctive prose," argues Eric Kohn at Cinematical.

Posted by dwhudson at June 11, 2008 2:20 AM