Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of Charlie's most cunning films!, 28 Jul 2000
By A Customer
This black comedy made in 1947, stars Charlie as a blue beard murderer who marries women, kills them and then takes their money! This film fell heavily to the cencors but fails to lose the magic. This is without doubt Chaplin's most witty and cunning film, he displays great intelligence and knowledge of life in the classic Monsieur Verdoux. When he is caught at the end and put on trial he pleads guilty but tells the court, who is really guilty, a single man or the machines and bombs designed to destroy and kill thousands at a time in war. This was another of Chaplin's films about opinion and how he saw life. A great film! A MUST buy!
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Reveals much about Chaplin, 15 Dec 2008
According to the commentary included with this 1947 film, Chaplin considered Monsieur Verdoux one of his best films. It would be more accurate to regard it as one of the best for illustrating his enormous vanity and self-obsession. In his 1940 film, The Great Dictator, Chaplin found humor in Hitler, who resembled him slightly in appearance and more than slightly in ego. In this film he finds a similar humor in a French serial killer who woes and murders women for their money. For Chaplin, the central figure in all human history and the only person who matters is always himself.
A better man would have used the film as a launching pad for actors younger, poorer, and less well-established than himself. Chaplin, who also wrote and directed it, sees it as another opportunity to strut his talents. No other actor was given a major role. Even the pretty young woman (Marilyn Nash) who has the second most important role merely exists to inflate our opinion of M. Verdoux. We are supposed to be impressed that, intending to kill her to test a new poison, he takes pity and lets her live. Chaplin is that self-obsessed.
In a city park, I once had to tell a man throwing knives at a tree just a few feet from a busy walkway that he had to stop. He defended his actions by talking about all those who die in highway accidents each year. I told the deluded twit that he was talking nonsense, that there was no relationship between the danger that one of his knives would bounce off a tree, hitting an child's eye and far away car crashes. In this film, Chaplin, scriptwriter and actor, is equally deluded. He really does think he is demonstrating a superiority morality when he compares his murders to the millions who die in wars: "As a mass killer," a smug and smiling Verdoux tells us, "I am an amateur in comparison."
This film may be sick as a comedy, but it is worth watching for what it tells us about Chaplin's politics and, by extension, the politics of similar celebrities today. When G. K. Chesterton warned between the wars that Germany would start another and still more horrible war, he explained why pacifists and militarists "are always in alliance, by a fatal logic far beyond any conscious conspiracy." By defining every aspect of war as evil, he wrote, they equate the arsonist with the firefighter. Chaplin does just that in this film, equating the French and English, who certainly did not want the war that had ended two years before, with Nazi Germany, which did. M. Verdoux (and by extension M. Chaplin) is claiming to be above any criticism we might direct at him. He is that vain and that self-obsessed. That's the main message this film carries.
Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
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