It is 1947. The air is still heavy with the echo of wartime massacres, and Charlie Chaplin is presenting his own personal game of massacres: a most unexpected film, the blackest of comedies, a fierce, tragicomic paradox called Monsieur Verdoux. The main character, Verdoux, was defined by the hardly enthusiastic and quite dismayed critiques of the time a “modern Landru”, the serial killer of the Thirties in the French province. Chaplin actually came up with the idea after Orson Welles – who was considering the opportunity of making a film on Landru’s life – offered him the lead role. Chaplin declined the offer, but took the idea, mentioning Welles in the credits. The public was disconcerted by Monsieur Verdoux, critics were embarrassed. The American League boycotted the film, and once again the censors took action with a zealous lack of understanding: willing to come to terms with the black heart of the film, “the anti-social content, the scenes where Verdoux accuses the System and the contemporary social structure” (sic: no one seemed to point out that the film took place officially in France between the two world wars), the focus was, above all, on the “unpleasant sensation of sexual offence which surrounds the life of Verdoux”. Chaplin is accused of Communism. This marks the beginning of the end of his relations with the United States. The true scandal of this film though, is, according to Bazin, the fact that for the first time Chaplin is absolutely not playing Charlot, yet he still is, completely, in a sort of negative image (Verdoux’s super adjustment to the social logic vs. the tramp being a misfit), a timely adulteration which reveals the nature of its charade only at the end: “A little man in shirt sleeves, his hands tied behind his back, goes skipping towards the gallows. And so it is the sublime gag, unformulated but evident, the gag which decides the entire film: Verdoux was him! They’re going to guillotine Charlot !”  Verdoux/Charlot thus goes to his death, a death which he himself prepared and chose after the amoral course his life had taken, and after that incredibly long, exhilarating, tremendous gag of a wife who was more shrewish than the others, and who escaped the repeated and ever more anxiety-provoking and slapstick attempts of murder. Charlot goes to his death after having overcome the comic and the pathetic, with a sentence that opens a peaceful, metaphysical abyss: “I’ll see you all very soon”. Stylistic triumph of the ellipsis, Monsieur Verdoux is the most enigmatic of Charlie Chaplin’s films. Today it returns, restored, to question us with its mystery that, as Jacques Lourcelles reminds us, “no one can boast of having thoroughly explored, and that has been well preserved over time”.

Paola Cristalli