Word: verdoux
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...acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights...
...terrifyingly comic Adenoid Hynkel (a takeoff on Hitler), whom Chaplin played in The Great Dictator, or M. Verdoux, the sardonic mass murderer of middle-aged women, may seem drastic departures from the "little fellow," but the Tramp is always ambivalent and many-sided. Funniest when he is most afraid, mincing and smirking as he attempts to placate those immune to pacification, constantly susceptible to reprogramming by nearby bodies or machines, skidding around a corner or sliding seamlessly from a pat to a shove while desire and doubt chase each other across his face, the Tramp is never unself-conscious, never...
When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we've known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He'd tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruelest of ironies attend...
...attempting an abortion, she helps out. Word gets around, and soon she is a successful businesswoman. And the perfect homebody: she performs abortions in the kitchen, rents her spare room to a prostitute and takes her collaborator lover (Nils Tavernier) to the bedroom. Like Charles Chaplin's murderous Monsieur Verdoux, she is a microcosm of her amoral country...
...asked him who the world's greatest comedian was. "I am," said Fields. Well what about Chaplin, the interviewer asked. "Chaplin," Fields answered. "He's no comedian. He's a goddamn ballerina." One takes heart in the knowledge that by the time he made his next feature, Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin had learned how to turn his blue-streaking tendencies into an advantage. One other thing; the last speech is rather moving (as much because of the actor as the writer) no matter what the louses...