Word: chaplinitis
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Monsieur Verdoux (United Artists), Charles Spencer Chaplin's first film since The Great Dictator (1940), is the story of a middle-aged French bank clerk who loses his job during a depression. Tenderly devoted to his invalid wife, his little boy, and their security, and disastrously ill-equipped to fend for them in a prolapsed economy, he nevertheless manages to set up in business for himself. The business: murder...
Like many a man who drives a ruthless bargain, M. Verdoux has his good side. He exhibits an exquisite gentleness toward children, the sick and the maimed, and even the humblest animals. He spares one prospective victim (a new Chaplin protege named Marilyn Nash), when he learns that she is the widow of a disabled war veteran and shares his burning pity for the helpless. He fails to close his deals with certain other clients too. He makes several brilliantly funny attempts on the life of rambunctious Martha Raye, but she was born lucky and is plainly indestructible. He nibbles...
...Numbers Sanctify." Chaplin has remarked that Verdoux paraphrases Clausewitz' idea that the logical extension of diplomacy is war. Verdoux's version: "The logical extension of business is murder." War, he tells the court which condemns him, is merely a grandiose multiplication of the crime he is dying for. But wholesale murder is condoned by the state. "Numbers . . ." (of killed men), he tells the fat-mouthed journalist who interviews him in his death cell, "numbers sanctify." An earnest priest, his last offices rejected, murmurs solemnly, "May God have mercy on your soul." "Why not?" replies M. Verdoux. "After...
...Life," said Charles Chaplin, on his 58th birthday, "begins at 50. ... The middle years are the mellow ones [without] agonies and tensions." Next day, a Manhattan court recorded a $6,450,000 damage suit against him. After seven years of brooding about the matter, Author Konrad Bercovici claimed that Charlie had "pirated" a Bercovici yarn as the basis of The Great Dictator...
...Vienna, where they don't care for machines anyway, the Socialist Arbeiterzeitung declared: "His creation, the production line . . . reminds us of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, which showed the ridiculous and tragic power of Fordismus over man. . . . Thus Ford was not a friend but an enemy of the worker...