Monsieur Verdoux

You should watch this movie if you haven't yet. It stars Charles Chaplin, in a film the original script for which was written by Orson Welles, based on the real life serial killer Henri Landru. Chaplin refused to be directed by Welles, bought and rewrote the script, and shot it in 1947. It's got sound, and is full of dark humor and blunt statements.

What's remarkable is its thesis: That capitalism leads to mass and serial killing. Simple as that.

Chaplin plays a mild-mannered bank clerk, loyal and competent, who is abruptly fired. He is shown no respect, loyalty, or appreciation by his bank. To find money for his wife and kids, he falls almost inadvertently into the habit of charming, marrying, and killing rich widows until a pair of them prove unpredictable and blow his cover. About this same time, he is ruined in a stock market crash, and meets a woman he’s been kind to twice -- his only moments of compassion and kindness -- who plucks him off the street, as he once did for her, and feeds him lunch. This bucks him up and, persuaded by her, he faces up to his crimes, all without batting an eye.

At his trial, he is calm and articulate. He refuses to seek clemency or excuses for his actions. He argues that business and soldiers kill for profit, so he is merely emulating capitalism. He says it’s a matter of numbers: If one man does it, it’s murder; if an army or a nation does it, it’s heroic and fine.

He ironically apologizes for not having done better.

Had he killed for anything other than money, then it might be a crime, he says. But because he was doing it strictly for business, the same as corporations, politicians, and armies do it, it should be sanctioned by society. Certainly much of it is, indeed, sanctioned; he makes oblique reference to Guernica, a war crime in which the Nazis strafed and bombed an entire village of innocent men, women, and children out of existence as they pursued their agenda. All sides do the same basic thing, he observed.

It's a disturbing, unsettling argument, especially in these horrible days of the Bush ascendancy.

At the end of the movie, when Verdoux is caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to be guillotined, he says: For thirty years I lived by my intelligence. When that was no longer needed, or wanted, I went into business for myself. As to being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Are w not making weapons of mass destruction as fast as possible? Have we not used them to kill innocent women and children, entire towns and cities? By contrast my efforts pale to insignificance. But I will leave you with one thought: I will soon lose my head, but I will see you , all of you, very soon."

Prescient and creepy, MONSIEUR VERDOUX rings like a damning indictment, and it is Welles's insight and Chaplin's eloquence that pegged us even that far back.

Rent or catch it on cable, it is well worth seeing, and perhaps the most modern of Chaplin’s films due to its unusually dark, ironic tone. Many blame that tone for the movie’s poor showing stateside when it was released. It did better in Europe, but has never been among Chaplin’s celebrated films. Yet it should be. Without the sentimentality and endless silliness typical of Chaplin’s movies, it makes points elegantly, and offers a portrait we all know too well, in these days of Hannibal Lector and George W. Bush.

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