Robert Warshow
I,
FILM CHRONICLE:
A FEELING OF SAD DIGNITY
Beneath all the social meanings of Chaplin's art there is one
insistent personal message that he is conveying to us all the time. It is
the message of most entertainers, maybe, but his especially because he is
so great an entertainer. "Love me"-he has asked this from the begin–
ning, buttering us up with his sweet ways and his calculated graceful
misadventures, with those exquisite manners so perfectly beside the point,
with that honeyed glance he casts at us so often, lips pursed in an out–
rageous simper, eyebrows and mustache moving
in
frantic invitation.
Love me. And we have, apparently, loved him, though with such under–
currents of revulsion as might be expected in response to so naked a
demand.
Does he love us? This is a strange question to ask of an artist.
But it is Chaplin himself who puts it in our mouths, harping on love
until we are forced almost in self-defense to say: what about
you?
He
does not love us; and maybe he doesn't love anything. Even in his
most genial moments we get now and then a glimpse of how cold a
heart has gone into his great blaze. Consider the scene in
City Lights
when he tactfully permits the blind girl to unravel his underwear in
the belief that she is rolling up her knitting wool; the delicacy of
feeling is wonderful, all right-who else could have conceived the need
for this particular kindness?-but it is he, that contriving artist there,
who has created the occasion for the delicacy in the first place. No, the
warmth that comes from his image on the screen is only our happy
opportunity to love him. He has no love to spare, he is too busy pushing
his
own
demand: love
me,
love
me,
poor Charlie, sweet Charlie. Prob–
ably he even despises us because we have responded so readily to his
blandishments, and also because we can never respond enough.
If
there was any doubt before, surely
Monsieur Verdoux
made
things clear. It gives us the Tramp no longer defeated by his graces but
suddenly turning them to account, master of himself and all around
him. And what is this mastery?-Verdoux is a murderer. I know very
well that Verdoux is not the Tramp, but he rises from the ashes of
