“Monsieur Verdoux” is part of a coincidental Charlie Chaplin trifecta that’s joined by “The Gold Rush” (the recent DVD release of which, by Criterion, I discuss in the magazine this week) and “Limelight” (which is playing tonight at MOMA at 6 P.M. and is also available on DVD). Chaplin should never be far from the thoughts of anyone who cares about movies; he made the cinema a world-historical phenomenon. His face, as the Little Tramp, is the face of the art form; he transformed his artistic inventions—with their blend of humanism and insolence, of anarchic defiance and moral passion, of ravenous desire and terrifying tenderness, of pride and vulnerability, fury and sensitivity, regal refinement and the wiles of the street—into living emblems of history’s turmoil even as they remained deeply personal works of self-portraiture and self-revelation.
In “Monsieur Verdoux,” his first film after the Second World War, Chaplin pushes the hypocrisy of manners to its ultimate extreme in a Bluebeard story—of a petit-bourgeois Chaplin whose elegance admits none of the Tramp’s tattered causticity—that resonates joltingly with the mass murders of wartime. In “The Gold Rush,” Chaplin looks both at the boom times of the Roaring Twenties and, all the more, at his very own boom town of Hollywood—and was un-ironic about both his tribulations and his triumphs. And “Limelight,” from 1952 (but set in 1914, both the year of war and the year that Chaplin started to make movies)—featuring him as an aging, drunk, now-unfunny has-been of a theatre clown who finds a small measure of redemption—is also a horrifying, fear-riddled self-portrait: its subject is what might have become of Chaplin in the absence of the cinema. There’s no more poignant definition of auteurism than in Chaplin’s embodiment of it. He was perhaps the most autonomous creator in the history of cinema, but the bigger and worldlier his subject, the more inescapably personal his approach to it became.
