FILM CHRONICLE
385
-is not self-deception the great bourgeois sin? Perhaps it was the crash
itself that broke his spirit; perhaps it is simply that the aging and unsuc–
cessful murderer, like. the aging and unsuccessful businessman, comes
to feel that his time has been wasted.
The peculiarly mechanical and almost unconcerned treatment of
Verdoux's family is one of the elements that seem to get Chaplin himself
involved in the movie's ambiguities. There has often been an obvious
morbidity in Chaplin's sentiment: he has been really tender only with
the maimed and the helpless, as if he required some palpable sign
of
misfortune and innocence before he could feel sympathy. This sentimen–
tality is in one aspect simply the reverse of his humor, for the helpless
cripple is also a kind of logical extension. But where the satiric extension
has the effect of broadening the satiric view of society, bringing more
and more objects into the field of the ridiculous, the sentimental exten–
sion does not broaden sentiment. On the contrary, by concentrating all
sympathy upon the obviously helpless, it becomes a means of narrowing
the field of sentiment (if you are not crippled, then you are not inno–
cent), and
it
thus reinforces the satire instead of counterbalancing
it.
In
Monsieur Verdoux,
where Chaplin's view of society has taken
on a new savagery, it would appear that he has correspondingly nar–
rowed the field of his sympathies even further. The crippled wife and
the helpless child are here, but they have become formal symbols without
content, expressing only an abstract belief in the moral importance of
helplessness. Chaplin still feels these figures to be necessary, but he
seems unable to take a direct interest in them. The true object of his ten–
derness is another figure, the homeless girl on whom Verdoux plans to
test his new poison. This girl personifies the gallant and lonely individual
bearing up confidently against the cruelties of life. She is alone, but she
is not helpless at all-except before Verdoux, and everyone is helpless
before Verdoux: even when he is caught at last, it must be by his own
choice. She is like Verdoux in many ways: she, too, is trying to make
her way; she, too, has suffered the world's blows; he can feel that she
understands the problem of life in his terms (she carries a volume of
Schopenhauer), and if her conclusions are in opposition to his, this is
all to the good, for it permits him to regard her as a child and to feel
his own wisdom. (But in the end it will be she who "succeeds"-as the
mistress of a munitions manufacturer-and she will sit weeping at Ver–
doux's trial.) Most important, she has loved an invalid-it is this that
makes him decide to spare her life. Thus it is no longer the cripple who
embodies virtue; it is only the person who loves the cripple. In short,
it is Chaplin himself, and the projections of himself that he puts upon
the screen.
