a review of 凡尔杜先生

1st Annual Criterion Challenge Week 50: Directed by Charlie Chaplin It took a while for me to really warm up to this one, as it's both weirdly dark for Chaplin but also somewhat sanitized in its depiction of him as a genteel serial murderer of rich widows. But once I got into the rhythm of how it bounces from one of Verdoux's little arrangements to the next, and how Chaplin manages to play all of the tones from slapstick to dark comedy to straight-up noir, I found myself really enjoying it. Chaplin repeats his rhetorical flourish from "The Great Dictator", where he more or less breaks character to reveal the moral of the story. But here it feels more personal, almost like a broadside against the people who smeared him as a Communist (maybe?) and a pervert (most definitely!) in the post-war years, although I imagine that it must have landed with a thud for audiences at the time.