FILM CHRONICL E
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feelings for women, the complete confidence of his technique (he always
does whatever is needed in the most direct way possible), the variety of
his invention, above all his unfailing awareness of
all
the emotional and
dramatic possibilities of every situation. (This last quality is shown per–
haps most brilliantly in the treatment of Annabella's maid. Few things
in the movie are at once so completely funny and so completely terrible
as the scene in which this miserable creature begins to lose her hair.) But
what I have primarily tried to demonstrate here is that the movie must
be approached with a willingness to understand and enjoy it as a shifting
pattern of ambiguity and irony, made up of all the complexities and
contradictions not only of our society but of Chaplin's own mind and
the mind of the spectator. Much of the hostility to the movie seems to
come from reluctance to accept its shifting point of view, its remarkable
quality of being at once uncompromising and uncommitted. We are used
to flat and simple statements, especially in the movies; as a consequence,
some who have seen
Monsieur V erdoux
have found it unpleasantly dis–
turbing, and some have simply refused to recognize its complexity at all,
condemning Chaplin because they disagree with Verdoux-though Ver–
doux certainly does not ask for agreement, and, if he did, it would still
not be clear what he wanted us to agree to.
Chaplin is surely one of the few great comic geniuses who have
appeared so far in history.
It
seems to me relatively unimportant to decide
whether or not
Monsieur V erdoux
is his best movie; we do not have
all his movies before us, and at any rate, as
I
have tried to show,
Mon–
sieur V erdoux
is the product of a radical change in his vision of the
world. Taken by itself, it is a great work of irony; and it is unique
among movies, for it requires of the spectator that he should constantly
reflect upon what he sees on the screen and what he discovers in his
own mind.
RoBERT
W
ARSHow
