Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s most spiritually sensitive storytellers. He always saw the humanity amid the inhumanity, whether it was in war-times, in frigid gold-digging times, or in modern times. (ehh? Modern Times?? Get it? Ugh…) With the Tramp, Chaplin was able to channel his earnest spirituality into a waif half-wit. “Monsieur Verdoux,” Chaplin’s second talkie after “The Great Dictator”, is no different theoretically. The film is a champion of love and humanity, like all his other films. The main difference here is that Chaplin, having abandoned the Tramp (and Hitler impressions), plays a (somewhat) regular guy. Without any limitations on character development, Chaplin goes deeper and darker than he has ever before and procures mostly stellar results.
Based on an idea by Orson Welles, it’s easy to see by the film’s end why Chaplin was attracted to Welles’ mind. Both storytellers are obsessed with approaching their characters with spiritual pragmatism (one might argue that spiritual pragmatism is the entire theme of “Citizen Kane”). Chaplin, of course considering his history with the Tramp, is much more earnest about it. At the end of the film, he pulls a Richard Wright or Upton Sinclair and has his character openly articulate the themes. After being sentenced to death for murder, Henri Verdoux says in his defense, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?” My mind begs to wonder what the story might have looked like had it been in Welles’ more subtle hands (my mind likes it some subtlety. Oh, Kubrick, had you directed “A.I”!) If the film has one fault, it is only that: its childish earnestness. But how deeply can a person fault a piece of art for being earnest? So long as it is earnest in truth (and it is), what appropriate grievance can be given aside from, perhaps, not being as emotionally invested as you might have been.
What’s really remarkable here is just how truthful it is. Sixty years later, and the plot still exists in things like AMC’s “Breaking Bad” and Showtime’s “Weeds.” Artists are still approaching their financially-strapped-but-loving subjects with spiritual pragmatism. The only difference is not really a thematic one, but a stylistic one. Henri Verdoux does some fairly awful things, things that Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White might squint their eyes at, but Chaplin directs implicitly. In regard to content, then, “Monsieur Verdoux” is incredibly ahead of its time. It deserves to be mentioned alongside other classics of the 40s like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Lola Montes.”