FILM CHRONICLE
the Tramp. In their separate ways they both represent the private life
of cultivation and sensibility in its opposition to society with its crowds
and wars and policemen.
If
the Tramp had an unconscious (which is
not possible), it might make him dream of being Verdoux, for Verdoux's
murders are committed so that he can carry on his own idyll with his
own Blind Girl;
it
is true that the idyll is utterly overshadowed by the
murders, but this may tell us as much about idylls as it does about
murder.
Monsieur Verdoux
is a cold and brilliant movie, perhaps more
brilliant than anything else ever done in the movies, but we must make
a certain effort of will to like it, for it gives us no clear moral frame–
work, no simple opportunities for sentiment, and not even, despite
Verdoux's continual "philosophical" pronouncements, any discernible
"message," but most of all an unremitting sensation of the absence of
love. The effort should be made. It is no part of Chaplin's function as
an artist to love us or anyone, and I do not offer these observations as
a complaint.
But
if
Monsieur Verdoux
was a disturbing experience for Chaplin's
audience, it must have been a truly painful one for Chaplin himself.
Sweet Charlie had changed his public personality, or at any rate had
thrown off its more agreeable disguises, revealing what he must have
thought a more serious and in that sense more "real" aspect of himself.
And the experiment was apparently disastrous; nobody loved him any
more: the "true" Chaplin was repulsive. There was even an organized
campaign against the movie, which, though it ostensibly concentrated
its fire on Chaplin's personal and political behavior, could be successful
only because
Monsieur Verdoux
was so forbidding. When this cam–
paign culminated some years later in the Attorney General's suggestion
that Chaplin, then in Europe, might not be permitted to re-enter this
country, there were surprisingly few Americans who cared. We can
say easily enough that this is a national shame: once again America
has rejected one of her great artists. And Chaplin, no doubt, is only
too ready to say the same thing; he has said it, in fact, a& crudely and
stupidly as possible, by his recent acceptance of the "World Peace Prize."
But for him, who has asked so insistently for our love, there mUlt be
more to it than that; there must be the possibility that he has given
himself away.
Limelight,
made during these years of the great comedian's disgrace
and completed just before his departure for Europe, is his apology and,
so far as he is capable of such a thing, his self-examination. "The story
of a clown who has lost his funny-bone," he called it while it was being
