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PARTISAN REVIEW
The film's quality of ambiguity-its tendency to make its statements
incompletely, or to take them back after they have been made, or to
modify and complicate them-is perhaps most apparent in the talk.
There is a great deal of talk, and a number of critics have found it
objectionable, either because it bored them or because they saw it as a
violation of the rather artificial principle that a movie must rely only
on the camera. I do not wish to claim that Verdoux's expositions of his
ideas are among the best things in the movie, but I found them full of
interest in themselves and extremely important in developing the total
effect of the movie's involved irony.
It may take some freshness of mind to reach the conclusion that
business is like murder, but there is also a certain puerility in laboring
the point. When Verdoux enunciates his ideas, they quickly become
platitudes, so that in attacking capitalist society, however sharply, he
simultaneously betrays the corruption of his own mind. But then the
irony takes one more tum, for, as I have said, the corruption of Ver–
doux's mind is precisely the corruption of the bourgeois mind, and in
exposing himself he again exposes his society. When he says, "This is a
ruthless world," or "Violence begets violence," what is that but the self–
satisfied voice of the practical man of business who takes a certain pride
in his "philosophy"?
In the final scenes before Verdoux's execution, the irony of his
speech and behavior reaches a climax of intensity and complication.
"I go
to
meet my destiny," he says, half seriously, as he prepares to
deliver himself to the police. And he maintains this ironic grandeur to
the end. He scores off everybody, for he has his clear-sighted "philosophy"
and the others have only their miserable falsehoods. "As a mass killer, I
am an amateur," he says in the court room, and then, his last little dig
before he is sentenced: "I shall see you all very soon ... very soon."
In the death cell during his last minutes, he is still eloquent: good and
evil-"too much of either will destroy us all"; sin-"who knows what
ultimate purpose it serves?" Graciously, he dismisses a reporter: "I hope
you will pardon me; my time is limited." He greets the priest, bowing :
"Ah, father! And what can I do for you?" He is, you might say, magnifi–
cent. Is this not how we should all wish to go to our executions-smiling,
dignified, witty, waving aside the last cigarette, accepting the last drink
("Rum? I've never tasted rum .. ."), quietly laughing at the whole
world? At the same time, this. dream is after all a little childish (it is a
curious fact that Chaplin actually looks like the elder Douglas Fairbanks
in this last scene), and Verdoux's triumph is really not much: they
will
cut his head off, and the one thing he has failed
to
do with all his talk
is to establish a single reason why they should not.
So everything goes down together, all caught in the same complex
absurdity: the capitalist world; then, in a heap, Verdoux the murderer
