Chaplin

FILM DIRECTOR

by Christian Blauvelt on July 12, 2010 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

Monsieur Verdoux, easily Chaplin's most underrated film, shows how far he had come in embracing sound design. When the titular gentleman, a bluebeard who marries women for their money then kills them, is plotting the death of Martha Raye while canoodling with her on a rowboat in the middle of a lake, another boater, a yodeler, passes by and foils Verdoux's murderous plans. We don't ever see the yodeler, we just hear him.

In Monsieur Verdoux, good manners are the most important trait a person can possess, a la Lubitsch. We identify with him, while the women he knocks off are never more than shrill, vulgar, and cruel. The film makes fun of bourgeois values in a way that hit far too close to home for postwar American audiences— especially returning GIs, who objected to Verdoux's critique of the accepted idea that killing on the battlefield is legitimate, while any other form of killing is a heinous crime. "For 35 years I used [my brains] honestly," Verdoux says. "After that, nobody wanted them, so I was forced to go into business for myself. As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and children to pieces, and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I'm an amateur by comparison." When Verdoux heads for the guillotine at the end, it's hard not to see the existential similarity to the fate of Albert Camus' absurdist hero in The Stranger.

His next film would have presumably been a return to form for his sentiment-hungry audience. Coming out in 1952, Limelight is Chaplin's weakest feature film, his most self-indulgent, and most sentimental. It is his pity party for having lost his American audience. As has-been comic Calvero, Chaplin sums up his condescending view of his audience: "I love them, but I don't admire them. As individuals, yes there's greatness in everyone, but as a crowd they are like a monster without a head that never knows which way it's going to turn." The film is a tribute to his absent father, who had also been abandoned by his audience (before himself abandoning his family), but the film's major set piece, a painfully extended flea-circus scene shows that Chaplin's objective with Limelight is not in any way comedy, but sentimentality. His duet with Buster Keaton, who, unemployed and long since unbankable, needed the work, is one of the few moments of true inspiration in Limelight. But at last with this film, Chaplin reaches his greatest indulgence—imagining his own death.

Limelight is very much in harmony, though, with his own life experiences at the time. After having traveled to London in 1952 with wife Oona O'Neill, Chaplin was denied a permit to re-enter the United States due to his leftist political leanings. He ultimately ended up settling in Switzerland, but he wasn't done with America just yet. In his 1957 A King in New York, Chaplin satirizes, somewhat obviously but with great bite, the vulgarities and excesses of contemporary American culture. All of it. Red-baiting, consumerism, tacky advertising, shallow pop music, plastic surgery, and even CinemaScope. Made in only a few weeks, it's a sloppy film and something of an eyesore. His aesthetic had at last become a theme without a style. When he directed A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967, starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, nobody even took any notice. Retiring at last to his home in Switzerland, Chaplin enjoyed the critical resurgence afforded him in the last years of life, including winning an Oscar for his score to Limelight in 1972, 20 years after the film's initial release.

When at last death came to him in 1977, it wasn't dramatic like Calvero's in Limelight, but a simple passing away into the realm of legend he had created for himself. The first artist to successfully translate his personality across multiple films (in fact, his entire cinematic career), Chaplin was thus also the first to find immortality within the confines of celluloid. Far from being uncinematic, Chaplin's films reveal him to be the original auteur of moving pictures, in charge of not only his own performance, but the direction and blocking of actors, composition of the frame, editing, and even musical score, building on the previous achievements of Méliès, Edwin Porter, Max Linder, and D.W. Griffith. For Chaplin, life was always tenuous and unstable, so how fitting that he would ultimately find his immortality in that most ephemeral medium of projected light and shadow.

The Chaplin festival will run for three weeks, from July 16 to August 5, at New York City's Film Forum. For details, including ticketing information, click here.

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