Chaplin changes! can you?” was the slogan of the publicity campaign for Monsieur Verdoux (1947), the first post-war film by beloved comedian Charlie Chaplin. It was the first film in which he did not play the bum who made him world famous: the naive-optimistic figure with bowler hat, baggy pants, walking stick and oversized shoes.
But the slogan could also apply to the waning reputation of the post-war Chaplin. In fact, he had become one of America’s most hated individuals. The trouble started in World War II, when Chaplin’s comments about the Russians as “comrades” confirmed the lingering mistrust of right-wing America that he would be a left-wing radical. The fact that US-based Englishman Chaplin never became a US citizen and was involved in a lawsuit to recognize the paternity of the child of 22-year-old actress, Joan Barry, added fuel to the fire. That lawsuit cemented his reputation as a licentious man who was attracted to very young women. When he married Oona O’Neill in 1943, she was 18, he was 54.
All of these issues left Chaplin’s post-war films a bit snowed in. They are a lot less well known than his earlier work. They deserve to be rediscovered; releasing ten of his films in restored copies offers that opportunity.
Monsieur Verdoux is a black comedy about serial killer Henri Verdoux. Chaplin based the film on the existing French serial killer Henri Landru, who murdered at least eleven people: ten women and the son of one of them.
In Chaplin’s film, Verdoux begins to kill when, during the crisis of the 1920s, he loses his job as a bank clerk after 35 years and has to keep his disabled wife and son out of poverty.
In tone is Monsieur Verdoux radically different from what Chaplin made before it, although in some scenes you can still see a shadow of his old persona as the bum. When Verdoux is finally caught, he explains at his trial that he sees murder as a business transaction that is in fact little different from the industrial-scale massacres of World War I and the Spanish Civil War. Released in 1947, the film also implicitly referred to the just-ending World War II. Verdoux: “Isn’t the world encouraging that I would be a mass murderer? Don’t people build weapons with which to destroy masses? Aren’t women getting blown up and little kids? And isn’t that done scientifically? I am an amateur by comparison.”
Until Chaplin’s grief flopped Monsieur Verdoux. He himself considered it his best film to date, but the right-wing press thought it was ‘anti-American’. Conservative organizations even called for a boycott.
witch hunt
In the years that followed, the heyday of McCarthy’s witch-hunt against the alleged communist danger followed. Chaplin came under fire as a man of very suspicious communist sympathies. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even revoked his residency when Chaplin was promoting his movie Limelight was in London, after which Chaplin settled in Switzerland for good with Oona and their (eventually) eight children.
Limelight (1952) with its numerous autobiographical elements is a very interesting film. It is about an old London music-hall comedian, Calvero, whose heyday is far behind him. After thwarting the suicide attempt of a young, disillusioned ballerina, he takes her under his wing. As her career takes off, he hopes in vain for a comeback. Calvero has been as let down by his audience as Chaplin himself. Calvero’s alcoholism mirrors that of Chaplin’s father. The young dancer Thereza (Claire Bloom) got traits from Chaplin’s mother and his first great love Hetty Kelly. Limelight is set in the Victorian London of Chaplin’s poverty-stricken youth. His son Sydney plays an important supporting role and his three youngest children (of Oona) appear in the opening scene.
Limelight is not a perfect movie, it drags and is too long. But at times Limelight very strong, especially in the moving finale and in a performance by Chaplin with his old rival Buster Keaton.
Chaplin’s late movie A King in New York (1957) is intriguing. It is about a monarch from a fictional European country who flees to New York after his palace is stormed by revolutionaries. Once in the US, he comes into contact with new phenomena such as rock and roll, widescreen films and advertising. The vulgarity and greed for money of the advertising world have to bear the brunt of this. Chaplin’s bitterness at the land where he lived for forty years speaks from the subplot in which King Shahdov meets a ten-year-old Marxist (played by Chaplin’s son Michael) whose parents have been busted for their radical ideas. They must appear before a committee that outlines the outlines of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
‘s message A King in New York is crystal clear: the former ‘alien communist’, as he appeared in the FBI files, got rid of his former homeland for good. The other way around as well: A King in New York was first shown in America in 1973.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of October 6, 2021