Шарли Чаплиннің «Мсье Верду» фильмі

1947 film by Charlie Chaplin

Monsieur Verdoux is a 1947 American black comedy film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, who plays a bigamist wife killer inspired by serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. The supporting cast includes Martha Raye, William Frawley, and Marilyn Nash. In the film, a bank teller is fired after three decades of work. The unemployed man still has to financially support his incapacitated wife and their child. He resorts to entering bigamous marriages with wealthy widows, killing each of them in turn. Years later, the con man goes bankrupt and loses his family. During a dinner with an old acquaintance, he is recognized by the family of one of his victims. He is sentenced to death in a murder trial, but compares his relatively few victims to the millions of people killed in wars waged for profit. The film ends with the killer heading to his execution.

Henri Verdoux had been a bank teller for thirty years before being laid off. To support his wheelchair using wife and his child, he turns to the business of marrying and murdering wealthy widows. The Couvais family becomes suspicious when Thelma Couvais withdraws all her money and disappears two weeks after marrying a man named "Varnay", whom they only know through a photograph. As Verdoux (Chaplin) prepares to sell Thelma Couvais's home, the widowed Marie Grosnay (Isobel Elsom) visits. Verdoux sees her as another "business" opportunity and attempts to charm her, but she refuses. Over the following weeks, Verdoux has a flower girl (Barbara Slater) repeatedly send Grosnay flowers. In need of money to invest, Verdoux, as M. Floray, visits Lydia Floray (Margaret Hoffman) and convinces her he is her absent husband. She complains that his engineering job has kept him away too long. That night, Verdoux murders her for her money. At a dinner party with his real wife and their friend the local chemist, Verdoux asks the chemist about the drug he developed to exterminate animals painlessly. The chemist explains the formula and that he had to stop working on it after the local pharmaceutical board banned it, so Verdoux attempts to recreate the drug. Shortly thereafter, Verdoux finds The Girl (Marilyn Nash) taking shelter from the rain in a doorway and takes her in. When he finds she was just released from prison and has nowhere to go, he prepares dinner for her with wine laced with his newly developed poison. Before drinking the wine, she thanks him for his kindness, and starts to talk about her husband who died while she was in jail. After she says her husband was a helpless invalid and that made her all the more devoted to him, Verdoux says he thinks there is cork in her wine and replaces it with a glass of unpoisoned wine. She leaves without knowing of his cynical intentions. Verdoux makes several attempts to murder Annabella Bonheur (Martha Raye), who believes Verdoux to be Bonheur, a sea captain who is frequently away, including by strangulation while boating, and by poisoned wine, but she is impervious, repeatedly escaping death without even realizing while, at the same time, putting Verdoux himself in danger or near death. Meanwhile, Grosnay eventually softens and relents from the continual flowers from Verdoux and invites him to her residence. He convinces her to marry him, and Grosnay's friends hold a large public wedding to Verdoux's disapproval. Unexpectedly, Annabella Bonheur shows up to the wedding. Panicking, Verdoux fakes a cramp to avoid being seen and eventually deserts the wedding. In the years leading up to the Second World War, European markets collapse, with the subsequent bank failures causing Verdoux to go bankrupt. The economic crisis leads to rise of fascism across Europe. A few years later, in 1937, with the Spanish Civil War underway, The Girl, now well dressed and chic, once again finds Verdoux on a street corner in Paris. She invites him to an elegant dinner at a high end restaurant as a gesture of gratitude for his actions earlier. The girl has married a wealthy munitions executive she does not love to be well off. Verdoux reveals that he has lost his family. At the restaurant, members of the Couvais family recognize Verdoux and attempt a pursuit. Verdoux delays them long enough to bid the unnamed girl farewell before letting himself be captured by the investigators. Verdoux is exposed and convicted of murder. When he is sentenced in the courtroom, rather than expressing remorse he takes the opportunity to say that the world encourages mass killers, and that compared to the makers of modern weapons he is but an amateur. Later, before being led from his cell to the guillotine, a journalist (Herb Vigran) asks him for a story with a moral, but he answers evasively, dismissing his killing of a few, for which he has been condemned, as not worse than the killing of many in war, for which others are honored, "Wars, conflict it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!" His last visitor before being taken to be executed is a priest (Fritz Leiber). When guards come to take him to the guillotine he is offered a cigarette, which he refuses, and a glass of rum, which he also refuses before changing his mind. He says "I've never tasted rum", downs the glass, and the priest begins reciting a prayer in Latin as the guards lead him away and the film ends.

This was the first feature film in which Chaplin's character bore no resemblance to his famous "Tramp" character (The Great Dictator did not feature the Tramp, but his "Jewish barber" bore some similarity). While immediately after the end of World War II there appeared on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean a spate of films, including in 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives, It's a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, which drew on so many people's experience of loss of loved ones and offered a kind of consolation, Monsieur Verdoux had an unapologetically dark tone, featuring as its protagonist a murderer who feels justified in committing his crimes. Consequently, it was poorly received in America when it premiered there. Moreover, Chaplin's popularity and public image had been irrevocably damaged by many scandals and political controversies before its release. The film had its world premiere at the Broadway Theatre in New York City on April 11, 1947. Chaplin was subjected to unusually hostile treatment by the press while promoting the opening of the film, and some boycotts took place during its short run. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said the film was "tediously slow" in many stretches but said that Chaplin's "performance is remarkably adroit and that those who assist him, especially Miss Raye, are completely up to snuff." A censorship board in Memphis, Tennessee, banned Monsieur Verdoux outright. At one press conference to promote the film, Chaplin invited questions from the press with the words "Proceed with the butchering". Richard Coe in The Washington Post lauded Monsieur Verdoux, calling it "a bold, brilliant and bitterly amusing film". James Agee praised the film as well, calling it "a great poem" and "one of the few indispensable works of our time". Evelyn Waugh praised Monsieur Verdoux as "a startling and mature work of art", although Waugh also added that he thought "there is a 'message' and I think, a deplorable one" in the film. The film was popular in France, where it had admissions of 2,605,679. In 1948, a Parisian named Verdoux and employed in a bank brought an unsuccessful suit against Chaplin, alleging that his coworkers had mocked him for his name during the period of the film's advertisement. Despite its poor commercial performance, the film was nominated for the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It also won the National Board of Review award for Best Film and the Bodil Award for Best American Film. In the decades since its release, Monsieur Verdoux has become more highly regarded. The film was voted at No. 63 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.