monsieur verdoux

at the film forum. it closed this week, but i had the great pleasure of going (with a friend who loves film like nobody else i know) to see it on the last day.

this is my second charlie chaplin film-city lights was the first-and i see how they are, intellectually very similar, little tramp or no little tramp. monsieur verdoux is overtly didactic where city lights certainly has a politics, but it is just below the surface. of course, this may be a result of the speeches at the end of monsieur. i understand that chaplin was reluctant to move away from silent film, and perhaps we can see here why. language has given him the ability to curse.

i wonder if welles’ involvement (hes credited with the original idea) added to these vocal politics? but welles’ tone is different from chaplin’s. chaplin takes a position, where welles tends only to insist on questioning, not settling on an answer.

does this sound like i am criticizing chaplin? i am not. i like that monsieur moves from what could be a lightly critical and humorous to directly critical–the audience is given the pleasure of the film, with its jokes, and that excellent gestural humor, and, oh my, could martha raye   be any better or funnier?, and then led to chaplin’s criticism of world politics at the beginning of the second world war.

did this influence godard? must’ve.

i got stuck on the scene where chaplin sits on the sofa and his elbow slips off the arm, upsetting his balance and eventually sending him off the sofa. his grandson, james thierree, does an excellent extended version of this same movement, unable to prop his chin in his hand, in the larger context of trying to sit in a chair, cross his legs and prop his chin, in au revoir parapluie. in the new yorker, he apparently expresses reluctance to be compared to chaplin, but then why take chaplin’s gesture and amplify it? (i think they’re both excellent, but i also think they are different, or they do different things.) chaplin is making social criticism and thierree, from what i have seen, is more interested in fairytales.

j. hoberman wrote this on monsieur.

very disjointed of me. more again later, perhaps?