- Monsieur Verdoux
On Friday, the Silent Film Society hosted a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, accompanied by the Greensboro Symphony Youth Orchestra of North Carolina, at the ill-fated Patio Theater. Chaplin, of course, was a stalwart of the American cinema and one of the preeminent purveyors of the form. When he began making short films he had a fascinating working style, often constructing stories and images on the spot, revamping and embellishing those that worked and discarding those that didn’t. As he moved to features, this sort of loose, investigative method resulted in narratives that were episodic in nature, and today, if any complaint is made about Chaplin’s films, it’s that they lack structure. Personally, I find his films artfully and imaginatively paced, especially in an age where predictable, easily digestible, and stylistically oppressive three-act structures rule the day. In his work you get a sense of life as a series of moments that are alternately mundane, strange, beguiling, devastating, hilarious, and, ultimately, transcendent. Few directors ever achieve true catharsis in their work—Chaplin is one of them. You can see my five favorite Chaplin films after the jump.
- Monsieur Verdoux (1947) The sharpest and most cynical film of Chaplin’s late period (yep, even more than The Great Dictator), a ribald black comedy whose controversial reception irrevocably altered the director’s career; the film, as such, was instantly dismissed as a failure. Of course, it’s understandable that audiences of the time would dismiss the film as categorically “un-Chaplin” (the Tramp, or some kind of vague, Tramp-like character, is nonexistent here), but decades of reevaluation has cemented the film as among the director’s most personal and forthright achievements.
