MonsieurVerdoux Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As a fresh 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin's quintessential 1947 thriller Monsieur Verdoux begins circulating through revival houses around the country, it seems like a good time to remind people that while the late actor is mainly known as a star of the silent screen, he definitely didn't die with it. Although the greatest slapstick artist of all time initially rejected the development of sound film, mocking it with hilariously exaggerated voices in City Lights, he eventually adopted it after realizing that resistance was futile. However, he refused to simply throw in a few lines of dialogue to accompany his beloved tramp shtick, choosing instead to take his career in a fresh direction. While Chaplin made many sound films over the course of several decades, only two of them really qualify as classic talkies (except for Limelight, which deserves a category of its own). Late flops like A King of New York don't really hold together, but Chaplin's initial forays into the world of sound film display his talent as a composer of distinctive prose.

His first work of this era, The Great Dictator, remains a masterpiece that broadened the potential of his tramp character with a modified Prince and the Pauper tale applied to World War II, and Chaplin doing double duty playing both a Jewish barber and an exaggerated Adolf Hitler (or "Hinkel," rather). Monsieur Verdoux, in which he plays a frustrated man whose losses during the Great Depression lead to a twisted scheme where he marries, murders and robs rich women, represented something else altogether: Chaplin's only brooding melodrama, the occasional laughs are almost incidental.

One of my personal heroes is the writer James Agee (1909-1955), who worked as a film critic for Time Magazine and The Nation between 1942 and 1948. He went on to write a new kind of fictional non-fiction book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as a novel, A Death in the Family, that was published after his death, and which won him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the screenplays for The African Queen (1952) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) as well as numerous other articles, stories and scripts. But it's his film criticism that I most admire. I re-read it every year or so, and it always re-charges my batteries.

Agee could pry apart a movie and lay bare its inner workings in an astonishingly tiny amount of space and with an extraordinary use of language. Best of all, when reading the book Agee on Film in order, you get a sense of the movie critic's beat, and all the time spent watching, thinking about and writing about bad movies. It reminds us that the majority of movies have always been bad, and even when the present moment seems like it probably contains the worst lot of movies ever produced by man, it probably doesn't.

One of the joys of reviewing movies is the chance, every so often, to see a restored classic on the big screen. In 2006, I had the opportunity to see the restored cut of Alfred E. Green's nasty pre-code classic Baby Face (1933), with Barbara Stanwyck in all her glory. Better still, I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) for the first time (both films screened at San Francisco's Balboa Theater). The Balboa also showed a recently uncovered war film, Stuart Cooper's Overlord (1975), a film with a simplicity and power lacking in most of the year's new pictures.

The great Rialto Pictures, the leading distributor of restored classics, gave us Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece Army of Shadows (1969); since it had never before opened in the United States, it has turned up on several critics' ten best lists for 2006. Also from Rialto we got Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948) and Christian-Jaque's silly swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe (1952). And to far greater publicity, Sony Pictures Classics re-released a bundle of Pedro Almodovar films, including Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004); I took advantage of the chance to see a few of these on the big screen. And each of them played on 400 screens or less.

Not always, but often, a re-release comes timed for a film's anniversary, and so I've made up a fantasy list of re-releases I'd like to see in 2007.