388
PARTISAN REVIEW
(how gracefully he handles the roses!), but awkward, impetuous, rather
boyish. What finally wins Madame Grosnay's heart is most of all his
delightful lack of sophistication, the seeming transparency of his inten–
tions. In the midst of one speech, Verdoux suddenly falls out the win–
dow-how could she distrust him after that? And later, when Madame
Grosnay has at last suggested that Verdoux need not hope in vain, there
is one of Chaplin's great moments: overcome by this encouragement,
the happy lover lunges at his lady on the sofa, overshoots the mark,
recovers himself, and throws himself upon her again-all without spilling
the cup of tea in his hand; it is the perfect symbol of the two sides of
Verdoux's character.
But the most interesting of the women is Annabella. Any attempt
'to disentangle Chaplin's own values from the, movie, or to identify him
absolutely with Verdoux, must take her into account. Annabella is the
full antithesis of Verdoux; she is loud and vulgar and stupid, and she is
as far removed as possible from the world of practical business enter–
prise: her money has been won in a lottery, and she invests it in hare–
brained enterprises exclusively-for instance, a project for generating
electric power by harnessing the rocking motion of the sea
("If
it works,
we'll just own the ocean, that's all!"). She is even in some degree
resistant to Verdoux's charm, and she regards him with a moronic
suspicion that is not to be overcome by the most disarming behavior.
It is this creature who defeats Verdoux, and she defeats him not
by opposing a superior reason or a superior morality to his, but simply
by a kind of blind fatality, as if she were a force of nature. Not only
does she defeat him: she overshadows him at every moment. With
Annabella, Verdoux is a subdued man; intelligence is on his side, but
in this case intelligence does not count-Annabella has the vitality.
There is a kind of desperation in his painstaking and elaborate attempts
to kill her: he is like a patient and conscientious man who tries to ac–
complish some perfectly reasonable and simple act and finds himself
unaccountably blocked. In the end, when the lonely lake and the rope
with a rock tied to it have failed, even he as he picks up the oars seems
to sense that he is up against a force greater than his own.
Verdoux's society cannot completely destroy him, even on the
guillotine, for he
is
the society, and his complete destruction would be
the society's death. But the existence of Annabella means that a differ–
ent answer is possible: the one thing that Verdoux cannot destroy, and
thus the one thing that the society cannot destroy, is the simple and unre–
fined fact of mere vitality.
A great deal could be said of the many other elements that help
to give the movie its moment-to-moment .qualities of imagination and
dramatic force: the peculiar involutions and profundities of Chaplin's
