MONSIEUR VERDOUX at Film Forum
June 8th, 2008 by Andre Soares
In The New York Times, J. Hoberman discusses Charles Chaplin’s 1947 dark-cum-sentimental comedy Monsieur Verdoux — my favorite Chaplin flick, partly because of its subversiveness, but mostly because of Martha Raye’s presence. (Hoberman completely ignores Raye in his article.)
"One spell was broken and another cast: the world’s most beloved clown became his adopted land’s most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux, a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux, opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is subtitled ‘A Comedy of Murders,’ and, as the French critic André Bazin observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash. Condemned to death at the movie’s end, he declares his crimes paltry compared with those of Western civilization: ‘As a mass killer, I’m an amateur by comparison.’"
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