MONSIEUR VERDOUX AS A LION COMIQUE

©Roy Export

Studio still of  Charlie dressed to the nines  as  a cynical   ladykiller in Monsieur Verdoux. This unsentimental  black comedy was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay in 1948.  Previously, in    the sentimental comedies  Chaplin made from 1914-1935 as the shabbily-attired   Little Tramp, wearing cast-off garments that hinted either at former or future pretensions of  lionly elegance, Chaplin’s gallant screen character had selflessly rescued  wistful young women in distress  from poverty, homelessness, unemployment, prostitution, incurable physical illness, loneliness, stolen babies and other  assorted  jams and pickles. All of  those rescue plots   involved unconscious autobiographical reenactments of  his    mother’s real life   trials and tribulations (see Chaplin A Life, Chapters I-VI  for details).

As a calculating serial ladykiller, Henri Verdoux, on the other hand,  seduces and  murders unsuspecting women for financial gain. At this point in his later life, 59-year-old Chaplin had finally begun    to revise   his former  childhood  over-idealization of his  ex-actress  mother at the expense of his lion comique father—a previously unresolved conflict which he would continue to explore   more fully in his next film, Limelight (1952).