Word: verdoux
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
UNTIL Little Murders, the great American sound comedies had always been nihilistic, disrespectful of traditional film genres, but severely handicapped by their own uneasiness in scoring thematic points. It is hard to take even films as distinguished as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux or Huston's Beat the Devil as little more than devastating evidence of the director's hatred for the work he had been doing and the authorities he had obeyed. Chaplin could glorify his own superiority, Huston could include himself (through Bogart) in ironic rings of betrayal and failure; the result was the same. Righteous indignation was nullified...
Limelight was essentially a tragedy, The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux, and A King In New York bitter social satires. Countess, his first film in over ten years, marks Chaplin's return to a kind of comedy he hadn't created since Modern Times. In many respects the comedy is similar to that of the earlier films. Though American comedy since Lubitsch and Wilder has tended increasingly toward the verbal, Chaplin still largely ignores the potential of comic dialogue, emphasizing the visual jokes instead...
Anecdotes & Omissions. His book is wonderfully revealing of the sources of his art, which developed the Tramp from the foot-in-the-cuspidor antics of the early two-reelers to the intense tragicomic ironies of those two flawed masterpieces, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. But it is uneven and uncommunicative about his many loves and his vociferous left-wing politics, supplying instead great heaps of anecdotes about his encounters with famous people from Einstein and Gandhi to Pablo Casals, Chou Enlai, and Khrushchev...
...Charlie Chaplin did in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), based on the Landru legend...
...support, is not a mark of greatness; it is, rather, an indication that technical or stylistic innovations have been strikingly exploited, or that an extreme statement has been made. Citizen Kane and L'Avventura, a classic and a mediocre trump-up, fall into the first category. Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux and Stanley Kramer's new work fall into the latter...