DWIGHT MACDONALD
[MacDonald quotes from a review which he wrote in 1956:]
Monsieur Verdoux is really two films, one a sentimental melodrama, the other a comedy in the old Chaplin style that burlesques the melodrama. What makes it confusing is that Chaplin shifts gears between the two without apparently knowing he is doing so…. It is unsettling to see an actor brilliantly taking off the conventional rhetoric of his trade one moment and the next employing it seriously, especially since Chaplin's serious rhetoric expresses a vain and foolish...
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©1981 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 491 words.)
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