Monsieur Verdoux is really two films, one a sentimental melodrama, the other a comedy in the old Chaplin style that burlesques the melodrama. What makes it confusing is that Chaplin shifts gears between the two without apparently knowing he is doing so. He will be strutting around in a comic scene with Martha Raye, flourishing his moustaches in an exquisitely shaded parody of the stock-company notion of a boulevardier, and in the next scene, with a pretty street waif as his foil, he will be playing the part straight, hamming it up with innocent relish...

It was a sad day for Chaplin when the intellectuals convinced him he was the Tragic Clown, the Little Man. From a parodist he graduated into a philosopher, but since his epistemology was all instinctive, even physical (his eyebrows, fingers, teeth “know” precisely, instantaneously, how to behave in order to mimic a clergyman, a banker, a dandy, a tramp), it didn’t help him in his new role. The nature of reality, which he understood intuitively as a mime, became opaque to him when he tried to think about it, and where he once danced lightly he now stumbles into bathos and sentimentality.

In the revolutionary act of making the screen say something, Chaplin has made it say too much. There is more material in his latest film than he is able to manage—which is to say, more than any living dramatic artist could manage. Had Chaplin been content to say something about capitalism, he could have done so with brilliant clarity. Actually, he blurred the edges of his main statement with perhaps incompatible and certainly irrelevant statements on other subjects no less enormous—such as the problem of evil and (what may be the same thing) the problem of women. It is hard to write a Critique of Political Economy and an Apologia pro Vita Sua at the same time...

I am much addicted to playgoing. I have seen Jonson and Moliere competently and even expertly performed. But I wonder if the competence and expertness of a hundred different productions taught me more about the way comedy works than the film Monsieur Verdoux. I can now imagine what sort of performance a Jonson or Moliere play would require before it could fully exist.

Talent is sometimes forgiven in Hollywood, genius never. They smell it out and seek its death. As soon as it was known that Charlie had a work in progress, before anything had been seen outside his strictly guarded studio, the critics made ready to damn it. In America the abuse of his new film has been almost unanimous. Now it has come to Europe. I trust we shall give it a very different reception...

The precision with which he performs every movement is the ballet dancer’s. Watch him demonstrate with a turn of the foot the quality of the floor in the house he is trying to sell. Study him laying the breakfast table, first for two, then, as he suddenly remembers the successful murder of the preceding night, for one. There is a scene in this film with the detective and a bottle of poisoned wine, which I will not spoil by telling. I wish merely to record that it is without qualification the finest piece of acting and dramatic construction I have ever seen.

Chaplin’s theme, the greatest and the most appropriate to its time that he has yet undertaken, is the bare problem of surviving at all in such a world as this. With his usual infallibility of instinct he has set his story in Europe; Europeans are aware of survival as a problem, as we are not. As rightly, he has set aside the tramp, whose charming lessons in survival are too wishful for his purposes, for his first image of the Responsible Man.