ANDRÉ BAZIN

It is easy to foresee what people will find to criticize in Monsieur Verdoux. There is a fairly complete list of them in an article in La Revue des Temps Modernes which goes about as far as anything could in misrepresentation. The author of the critique expresses herself as profoundly disappointed by Chaplin's work because to her it seems ideologically, psychologically, and aesthetically incoherent. "Monsieur Verdoux's crimes are dictated neither by a need for self-defense nor in order to repair injustices, nor by a deep ambition, nor by the desire to improve anything in the world around him. It is a sad thing to have expended so much energy and proved absolutely nothing, to have succeeded in producing neither a comedy nor a film with social implications, and to have beclouded the most important issues." (p. 103)

If Verdoux has a "meaning," why look for it in terms of some moral, political, or social ideology or other, or even in reference to psychological categories that we are in the habit of seeing as revealed in the characters of our theater or our novels, when it is so easy to discover it in Charlie?

The critic quoted above attacks Chaplin's performance, accusing him of failing to escape altogether from the comic format of his former character, of hesitating, not choosing one way or another, between the realistic interpretation that the role of Verdoux demands and the conventions of a "Charlie." The fact is that in this instance realism would add up to illusion. Charlie is always there as if superimposed on Verdoux, because Verdoux is Charlie. It is important that at the right moment the public should recognize him without any shadow of a doubt; and this wonderful moment arrives in the final shot when Verdoux, alias Charlie, goes off in shirtsleeves between the executioners. Verdoux, or Charlie disguised as his opposite! There is no feature of the former character that is not turned inside out like the fingers of a glove. (pp. 105-06)

Monsieur Verdoux is Chaplin's New Testament. The Old ended with The Gold Rush and The Circus. Between the two, the Chaplin myth seems to be confused, troubled, uncertain. He is still trying to rely on gags and comic bits which, however, grow fewer and fewer. The Great Dictator is significant from this point of view. Although badly constructed, mixed up, oddly assorted, it did have one brilliant and fortuitous justification, a settling of accounts with Hitler…. (p. 110)

What is admirable about Monsieur Verdoux is that his activities have a much deeper significance than those of Charlie in The Gold Rush although they are of a completely opposite kind. Actually, from the first Keystone shorts to The Gold Rush and The Circus Charlie's character has passed through a moral and psychological evolution. (p. 111)

[With The Gold Rush] Charlie is at the end of a process of evolution that justifies our coming to the conclusion that it does not represent his work at its best. As far as I am concerned, I would rather have the rich equivocation of The Pilgrim in which his art has not yet troubled about, or become enfeebled by, a concern for psychological and moral values. In any event, The Gold Rush is the most forceful apology for the character and most clearly calls for us to revolt against Charlie's fate.

The Saint Verdoux of today is the dialectical answer to Saint Charlie of The Kid, The Circus, and The Gold Rush. But in my view the indictment of Charlie's enemies and the vindication provided by the character are all the more convincing because they are not based on any psychological proof. We go along with Verdoux, we are for Verdoux. But how can our sympathy be based on our moral estimate of him? On that level the spectator too could only condemn Verdoux's cynicism. Yet we take him as he is. It is the character that we love, not his qualities or his defects. The audience's sympathy for Verdoux is focused on the myth, not on what he stands for morally. (p. 112)

Even under the guise of Verdoux-Bluebeard, Charlie follows and perfects his personal myth of the woman…. There is no need to have recourse to the latest subtleties of psychoanalysis to see quite evidently that Chaplin, by way of Charlie, pursues symbolically one and the same feminine myth. Between the tender and gentle Edna Purviance, the blind girl of City Lights, and Verdoux's frail invalid there is no noticeable difference except that Verdoux is married to the last named. Like Charlie, they are all unhappy human beings, ill adjusted to society, physical or moral invalids of society and morality…. If we correctly interpret the symbolism of these female characters then the whole of Charlie's work would be the ever-renewed search for the woman capable of reconciling him to society and by the same token to himself…. Love alone can prompt his desire, albeit blundering and comic for other reasons, not only to adapt himself to society but one might even say to accept a moral way of living and a psychological individualism. (pp. 114-15)

For the first time in Monsieur Verdoux, we see Charlie after his marriage to Edna Purviance. Maybe because he has rounded the cape of love that, at least according to the logic of the myth, Charlie can change himself into Verdoux, or perhaps, if you prefer, Verdoux simply had to be married to Edna Purviance. In any case, although he is not all that reconciled to society, he at least knows how to make use of it. (pp. 115-16)

Chaplin does not build the substance of his narrative on the basis of a skeletal scenario, of an abstract dramatic structure, even the very substantial one of tragedy…. [His films] are only sequences of quasi-autonomous scenes, each of which is content to exploit a situation to the full. Think back to what you can remember of Charlie, and dozens of scenes will come to mind as clear cut as the picture of the character himself;… all are sufficient unto themselves,… so that one might almost extrapolate them from one film to another…. Even in the best-made of his films the so-called structural qualities are the most extrinsic to them, the last by which we would determine their excellence. Of course it would have been better if Chaplin had known how to reconcile the dramatic development of a story with the development of the situations of which it is composed, even better still, if this useful ordering of succession and interrelation conveyed a more hidden order in the conceiving and developing of a gag, and, most of all, that mysterious economy which gives the scenes, however short, their spiritual density, their specific gravity as myth and as comedy. The only serious formal criticisms that can be leveled against a Chaplin film concern its unity of style, the unfortunate variations in tone, the conflicts in the symbolism implicit in the situations. From this point of view the quality of Chaplin's films since The Gold Rush has definitely fallen off. (pp. 118-19)

As a rule, this falling off in quality in Chaplin's next to last films is attributed to a parasitic ideology. As we know, Chaplin has some pretensions to being a social philosopher, and no injustice is done to the artist to find his ideas, though appealing, also an encumbrance. Clearly Easy Street, or for that matter The Gold Rush, do not set out to prove anything, while there is no mistaking the purpose or theses of Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and Monsieur Verdoux. We could willingly do without these; but it remains to determine if they are as important as has been alleged. (p. 119)

We must not conclude … that [Monsieur Verdoux] has no formal structure, no narrative architecture, and that the direction consists in nothing more than setting up situations. Just the opposite, in fact. To recall what film direction owes not only to A Woman of Paris but to Charlie's work as a whole is to repeat a truism. Monsieur Verdoux shows its originality precisely in achieving a kind of synthesis between the celebrated psychological film directed by Chaplin and the films in which Charlie appears. Whereby we clearly see that the technique of ellipsis and allusion which was the definitive aesthetic revelation of A Woman of Paris somehow naturally befits the character. Chaplin's method of direction consists in carrying Charlie's performance over into the camerawork, the shooting script, and the editing. But Chaplin's ellipsis, whether applied to space or time, is not really concerned with what we call the scenario. It only affects the narrative at the scene level in immediate relation to the actor within the structure of the situation. It would be impossible to think of a closer dependence of content and form, or, better, a more perfect fusion of the two. Ellipsis gives definition to the aesthetic crystallization of Chaplin's work. But in this connection, Monsieur Verdoux is undoubtedly the most completely crystallized film of all. (pp. 121-22)

What could mislead us about the formal qualities of Monsieur Verdoux and make us consider it less well made than, for example, The Gold Rush (whereas it is certainly more perfectly made) is a natural confusion in the spectator between the comic density of the film and the myth. Whenever one thinks of Charlie, he is inseparable from the comic routines with which he won over the public. Since The Gold Rush, there has been a sharp decline in the wealth of Chaplin's comic imagination. There is more inventiveness, there are more gags in three hundred feet of The Pilgrim than in all of his last four films. There is certainly no room here for congratulation. On the other hand, neither should we harbor any resentment against Chaplin, nor interpret the fact as necessarily indicating an aesthetic impoverishment. Rather, everything takes place in Monsieur Verdoux as if this undeniable draining of his comic genius was the price to be paid for, or perhaps the cause of, an increased refinement of the myth. (pp. 122-23)

[What] would Limelight mean to an imaginary spectator who had never heard of Chaplin or of Charlie? Probably the question is meaningless because it contains a contradiction in terms—and this contradiction immediately gives us the measure of the film. There are certainly more people on earth who have never heard of Napoleon or Hitler or Churchill or Stalin, than of Charlie. The Great Dictator was not possible, indeed had no meaning, except insofar as Chaplin was sure that the myth of Charlie was more powerful and more real than that of Hitler, that their physical resemblance worked in his favor, and that Charlie would thereby drain his double of his blood, leaving only skin and bone. For it is crucial to grasp that the basis of the film was not the exploitation by Chaplin of his likeness to the man of Berchtesgaden; on the contrary, it was based on the unwitting imitation of Charlie by Hitler. To unmask the dictator, Chaplin had only to remind the world of his copyright in the moustache.

This is something that must be thoroughly understood before one starts thinking about Limelight. It is impossible to separate the story of Calvero from the Chaplin myth. I do not mean in the elementary and primary sense that one can discern in the story some obvious autobiographical elements—"a portrait of the artist by himself," as one English critic put it; but in a more basic sense, namely of a self-criticism of the myth by its author. Verdoux was already meant to do this: the killer of widows was Charlie disguised as his social opposite number. In Limelight the machinery is much more complex, to the decisive degree that we are not concerned with Charlie but with Chaplin himself. Verdoux, in a sense, represented the dialectical triumph of the character of Charlie and by the same token the end of him. Limelight treats by implication the relations between an actor and character he plays. (p. 125)

While Limelight is a direct evocation of Chaplin's childhood, this evocation is subordinated to the theme of the actor's relation with the character he plays. The true subject of the film remains: Can Charlie die? Can Charlie grow old? Instead of handling this two-fold and touching inquiry like a question to be answered, Chaplin exorcises it through a story of the lost fame and old age of a man who resembles him like a brother. (p. 126)

The film was just a sublime bad dream, but a dream as true as reality, one that allowed us to measure our love for him in his most beautiful role: the death of a clown called Charlie. Who in the world since theater began, what playwright or actor, has ever reached that supreme and paradoxical position in his art of being in himself the object of his tragedy? Doubtless many authors have put themselves more or less into their works, but without the knowledge of the public and hence without the elements of drama. (p. 127)

..…

It was easy at the outset to see how much in Limelight would disturb people who had gone in the anticipation of seeing "a Charlie Chaplin film"—which retained, even more than Monsieur Verdoux, some element of comedy. Nor was the melodramatic aspect of the story calculated to please people, because it was based on illusion. Limelight is a pseudo melodrama. Where melodrama is primarily defined by the absence of ambiguity in the characters, here Calvero is ambiguity itself; and whereas, from a dramatic point of view, melodrama requires that one should be able to forsee the outcome of the plot, Limelight is precisely a film in which what happens is never exactly what one might expect—its scenario is brim full of inventiveness as any ever written. (p. 129)

Chaplin is not trying to deviate from the conventions of melodrama as Cocteau did in Les Parents terribles—on the contrary, no one has taken himself more seriously. It is simply that situations which start out as conventional are exploited with complete freedom, and without any concern for their traditional meaning. In short, there is nothing in Limelight which on the face of it could guarantee it wide public acceptance unless through a misunderstanding. (p. 130)

Almost everybody praises the second half, but many deplore the longueurs and the talkiness of the first half. However, if one were truly responsive to the last 24 minutes of the film, in retrospect one could not imagine a different opening. It becomes apparent that even the boredom one might experience enters mysteriously into the harmony of the over-all work. In any case, what do we mean here by the word boredom? I have seen Limelight three times and I admit I was bored three times, not always in the same places. Also, I never wished for any shortening of this period of boredom. It was rather a relaxing of attention that left my mind half free to wander—a daydreaming about the images. There were also many occasions on which the feeling of length left me during the screening. The film, objectively speaking a long one …, and slow, caused a lot of people, myself included, to lose their sense of time. I see that this phenomenon and the special nature of my periodical boredom have a common cause, namely that the structure of Limelight is really more musical than dramatic. I find this confirmed by the English pressbook of the film, three quarters of which is devoted to the music of Limelight [and] to the importance that Chaplin attached to it…. (p. 132)

Since Modern Times, the last of his films to come directly out of the primitive genre of Mack Sennett and the last of his virtually silent films, Chaplin has never stopped moving forward into the unknown, rediscovering the cinema in relation to himself. Alongside Limelight, all other films, even those we most admire, seem cut and dried and conventional. Although they may express their author's views, although they may have a personal style, they are only original in part; they conform to some film usages, they are defined by current conventions, even when they contravene them. Limelight is like no other film, above all like no other Chaplin film. (p. 139)

André Bazin, "The Myth of 'Monsieur Verdoux'," "'Limelight', or the Death of Molière," and "The Grandeur of 'Limelight'," in his What Is Cinema? Vol. II, edited and translated by Hugh Gray (copyright © 1971 by the Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), University of California Press, 1971, pp. 102-39.