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PAR T I 5"'A N REV
rE
W
the world, always escaping in the end but keeping up the excitement
of the chase and even hinting' strongly that he might like to
be
caught
if only he did not like more to get away. Verdoux, having turned his
frigidity into a means of making a living, is necessarily involved with
the world from the start, though he tries hard to claim he is not; and he
does get caught, to have his head cut off-which is possibly the kind
of thing the Tramp was afraid might happen. Calvero is too self–
contained either to commit murder like Verdoux or to run away like
the Tramp; it would be undignified. He simply does not let anyone
approach him. Certainly the five wives have 16ft no traces; the pictures
on Calvero's walls are pictures of himself. When the girl is practically
forced on him, he hastens to proclaim his detachment (". . . one more
or less doesn't bother me") and to lay down the terms of their relation,
which is to be "platonic." It does not appear that this prescription is
ever violated.
Thus Calvero stands alone on the stage-in the fading "limelight"
-and does not so much play .out his personal drama as expound it. In
the very tones of his voice one can feel his refusal to communicate
dramatically. The girl, to whom he does most of his talking, is often
little more than a point in space toward which he may orient himself;
his words pass over and beyond her-they are not really intended for
her at all. At bottom they are probably not even intended for us in
the audience-the "monster without a head"- though, like the girl, we
are allowed to listen and expected to admire. It is as if the whole movie
were one of those dreams in which Calvero, trying to reassert his
identity, dreams not of
being
on the stage but of
seeing
himself on the
stage. He is his own audience, and his "inside," even to him, is only
a mirror image of the outside. When he speaks, it is to hear his voice
re-echoing within the isolation of his own being. How could he possibly
have learned to sense when his words and postures begin to be false?-he
has never watched the faces of those he has pretended to be talking to.
But I am not willing to leave it at that. It is not at all necessary
that a clown should be in a true relation with others, or even that he
should always be funny; the only necessity is that he should fail and
that there should be moments when we are able to imagine that his
failure is, "after all," a kind of success. Calvero's failure is clear enough:
he cannot get us to take him seriously in the way he wants to be taken.
We believe as much as he does in "Life" and the "miracle of conscious–
ness"; it is an impertinence for him to lecture us about these things
unless he can be eloquent, and eloquence is beyond him:
all
he can
