[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 concept of himself—as the tragic man-of-the-world, disenchanted, elegant, sensitive, the gallant protector of the weak who, to make the bogus diamond shine all the more brilliantly, are usually crippled or blind. In the film after Verdoux, the disastrous Limelight, this mawkish exhibitionism goes right over the edge…. (p. 18)

There is even a third film here, that bursts into the last part with shattering banality, a 'message' drama…. It was a sad day for Chaplin when the intellectuals convinced him he was the Tragic Clown, the Little Man. From a parodist, he graduated into a philosopher, but since his epistemology was all instinctive, even physical … it didn't help him in his new role. The nature of reality, which he understood intuitively as a mime, became opaque to him when he tried to think about it, and where he once danced lightly he now stumbles into bathos and sentimentality.

Rereading the above, after seeing Verdoux again last year, I think it on the whole accurate. (p. 24)

Chaplin's direction is no better than his script…. Neither realistic nor stylized, Verdoux is amateurish without freshness, Hollywoodish without technique. It comes to life only when Chaplin is on stage, and even then only when he is parodying his boulevardier and not in the longer stretches when he is trying to impress us as a philosopher…. As Chaplin's script is only a device to show him off … so his direction reduces all the other performers to stooges…. His directorial eye finds nothing interesting in the inanimate world either, which is also reduced to a conventional background for his own performance. I can recall few films in which there was so little to see. Since it is a movie, Chaplin thinks he has to show us realistic interiors and real landscapes and cityscapes, but they are botched in so routinely, with so little sense of what they look like, that they might as well be those painted backdrops of a park or a street, bordered with local advertisements, in front of which vaudevillians used to do their turns. (pp. 26, 28)