FILM CHRONICLE
667
he is a thorough clown. Chaplin is among the subtlest of artists, but he
is not corrupted by subtlety. His gestures remain broad, his statements
marvelously simple and clear, his ideas self-confidently crude. When
Calvero smells gas on entering his house, he looks first at the soles of
his shoes to see whether he has stepped into dog's excrement. Even while
he lectures on the Spirit of Life to the young girl he has saved from
suicide, he remains primarily concerned with such distractions as the
smell.of kippered herring that has got onto his fingers- not exactly to
underline what he is saying, though it has this effect, but simply be–
cause he knows a smell is always more arresting than an idea. And
after all these past years of developing cinematic "art," Chaplin remains
the most innocent of film technicians, using his camera only to seek
the most direct means of exposition and his lighting only to illuminate;
a clown's first task is to make his point unmistakably: if there is subtlety,
it will come. What a world of sophistication has had to pass over Chap–
lin's head so that he may open this film with the epigraph, "The
glamour of limelight, from which age must pass as youth enters. ..."
Of course we would be wrong to take this epigraph entirely at face
value. Chaplin often turns out to be more conscious of what he is doing
than we suspect, and he has chosen to preserve the archaic tone. But
with whatever reservations, he does certainly believe in what it expresses,
in the "glamour of lime1ight"-which must mean the glamour of his
own personality.
It
is true, perhaps, that he ought to be beyond that
by now: we all know, don't we, that applause and "glamour" are not
what really matter. But he is willing to admit he is not beyond it, just
as he is willing to admit he can't keep his mind on the deeper questions
of existence because of the smell of herring that clings to his hands.
The joke is, of course, that we can't either: nobody ever gets "beyond"
anything; that's probably the one joke there is in the world, and all the
clowns have nothing to do but tell it to us over and over-no wonder
they see no point in being anything but clear.
But though Calvero can never quite get away from the kippered
herring, he keeps trying. Once awakened to the advantages of talking
pictures, Chaplin in his last two movies has found it almost impossible
to stop talking; it seems to have come upon him that he must bring
forth all at once the stored-up wisdom of a lifetime. And like many who
have thought to save their deepest statements for the last (Mark Twain
is another example), Chaplin turns out to have nothing, very illuminat–
ing to say; his true profundity is still in his silences. Verdoux, having
discovered that men do not really live up to their moral ideas, not only
drew the logical conclusion by becoming a murderer, but could not
