New York Times: When Chaplin Became the Enemy

[Bruce Calvert]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin

When Chaplin Became the Enemy

Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.

By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.

"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.

Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.

Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."

Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.

To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.

At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.

The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").

"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."

Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.

For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.

Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."

While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.

"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"


J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.

[sir m]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

[David Totheroh]

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue  of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success." There was a
very limited reissue of most of the major films to coincide with the
publication of My Autobiography in 1964. Then, in the early '70s,
mostly as a result of a new distribution contract, there was another
wave of screenings. Although very popular with film history buffs,
neither of those rereleases could accurately be called "huge."

All that is admittedly domestic U.S. reality. But since the negative
reception of Monsieur Verdoux discussed in the article was pretty much
limited to the U.S., it hardly makes sense to contrast a more
favorable reception internationally, where Chaplin's reputation
remained pretty much untainted by the anti-communist hysteria that
permeated the U.S. in the '50s.

[sir m]

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success." There was a
very limited reissue of most of the major films to coincide with the
publication of My Autobiography in 1964. Then, in the early '70s,
mostly as a result of a new distribution contract, there was another
wave of screenings. Although very popular with film history buffs,
neither of those rereleases could accurately be called "huge."
All that is admittedly domestic U.S. reality. But since the negative
reception of Monsieur Verdoux discussed in the article was pretty much
limited to the U.S., it hardly makes sense to contrast a more
favorable reception internationally, where Chaplin's reputation
remained pretty much untainted by the anti-communist hysteria that
permeated the U.S. in the '50s.

you are correct. I based my opinion on reading an old Life magazine
article

[Feuillade]

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue  of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success."

On what are you basing this? I've always been given to believe, based
on Theodore Huff (who was writing less than two years after the fact),
that "City Lights" was indeed a big hit on its rerelease in 1950 --
although Robinson in his bio doesn't seem to even mention the reissue.

Tom Moran

[r***@yahoo.com]

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue  of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success."

On what are you basing this?  I've always been given to believe, based
on Theodore Huff (who was writing less than two years after the fact),
that "City Lights" was indeed a big hit on its rerelease in 1950 --
although Robinson in his bio doesn't seem to even mention the reissue.
Tom Moran- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

My mother remembers seeing picketers from the VFW and the DAR marching
in front of the Moorestown NJ theater that booked City Lights in
1950. If that was going on all over the country, it would have
depressed the box office or just have had a chilling effect on
exhibitors who figured, "Who needs the grief? Just book an Abbott &
Costello."

Rob Farr
www.slapsticon.org
www.slapsticon.org/mugshots.htm

[sir m]

Post by r***@yahoo.com

Post by Feuillade

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success."

On what are you basing this? I've always been given to believe, based
on Theodore Huff (who was writing less than two years after the fact),
that "City Lights" was indeed a big hit on its rerelease in 1950 --
although Robinson in his bio doesn't seem to even mention the reissue.
Tom Moran- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

My mother remembers seeing picketers from the VFW and the DAR marching
in front of the Moorestown NJ theater that booked City Lights in
1950. If that was going on all over the country, it would have
depressed the box office or just have had a chilling effect on
exhibitors who figured, "Who needs the grief? Just book an Abbott &
Costello."
Rob Farrwww.slapsticon.orgwww.slapsticon.org/mugshots.htm

there should be a law prohibiting such acts. Attempting to deprive
people of an opportunity too laugh is a SIN

[David Totheroh]

Post by sir m

Post by r***@yahoo.com

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue  of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success."

On what are you basing this?  I've always been given to believe, based
on Theodore Huff (who was writing less than two years after the fact),
that "City Lights" was indeed a big hit on its rerelease in 1950 --
although Robinson in his bio doesn't seem to even mention the reissue.
Tom Moran- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

My mother remembers seeing picketers from the VFW and the DAR marching
in front of the Moorestown NJ theater that booked City Lights in
1950.  If that was going on all over the country, it would have
depressed the box office or just have had a chilling effect on
exhibitors who figured, "Who needs the grief?  Just book an Abbott &
Costello."
Rob Farrwww.slapsticon.orgwww.slapsticon.org/mugshots.htm

there should be a law prohibiting such acts. Attempting to deprive
people of an opportunity too laugh is a SIN

Yeah, and free speech is such a small price to pay.

[David Totheroh]

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/movies/08hobe.html?_r=1&ref=movies&...
When Chaplin Became the Enemy
Everett Collection
Charlie Chaplin and Mady Correll in the 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux," which
has a weeklong run at Film Forum.
By J. HOBERMAN
Published: June 8, 2008
ONE spell was broken and another cast: the world's most beloved clown became
his adopted land's most reviled figure. As the cold war coalesced in 1947,
Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp mutated into the monstrous Monsieur Verdoux,
a professional bigamist and serial killer supporting his family by marrying
and dispatching a succession of wealthy widows.
"Monsieur Verdoux," opening Friday for a weeklong run at Film Forum, is
subtitled "A Comedy of Murders," and, as the French critic André Bazin
observed, it turns the Chaplin universe upside down. The erstwhile tramp is
here an honest bank clerk driven to homicide by the 1929 stock market crash.
Condemned to death at the movie's end, he declares his crimes paltry
compared with those of Western civilization: "As a mass killer, I'm an
amateur by comparison."
Chaplin considered this, his first post-World War II movie, a topical one.
As he had satirized Adolf Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), he would
now comment on the carnage Hitler provoked and the mass destruction he
feared would follow. "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension
of diplomacy," Chaplin told an interviewer. "Verdoux feels that murder is
the logical extension of business." But "Monsieur Verdoux" was also the
logical result of Chaplin's feelings of victimhood, as a celebrity and a
man.
Although enormously popular, "The Great Dictator" had not been without
controversy; it was denounced as interventionist propaganda on the Senate
floor. The stormier reception for "Monsieur Verdoux" reflected both the film's
content and the filmmaker's character.
Throughout the war Chaplin was under attack for his morals - in the form of
a sensational paternity suit - and political sympathies. For some the two
were identical. Representative John E. Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat,
denounced Chaplin as a Communist "notorious for his forcible seduction of
white girls." Even before "Monsieur Verdoux" opened in April 1947 the
Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I.
director, begging him for an opportunity to attack the star: "You give me
the material and I'll blast."
Hoover, who demurred, did have a hefty file on Chaplin, including a recent
report associating him with the radical émigrés Hanns Eisler and Bertolt
Brecht. But "Monsieur Verdoux" - which was surely influenced by Brecht's
notions of social satire - brought its own disaster.
To introduce the film, his first movie in seven years, Chaplin insisted on a
series of news conferences. Before the premiere he entertained friendly
questions from foreign journalists. The screening itself, at the refitted
Broadway Theater in Manhattan, was less cordial. Taken aback by audience
hissing, Chaplin fled the scene.
At a subsequent meeting with reporters in the Gotham Hotel's packed Grand
Ballroom he encountered even greater animosity. Half the questions concerned
his politics or national loyalty. He was accused of being a Communist
sympathizer and questioned about his friendship with Eisler, then the prime
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee's evolving
investigation into Communism in Hollywood.
The next day "Monsieur Verdoux" received the worst notices of Chaplin's
career, attacked as unfunny, tasteless, poorly made, morally dubious and,
per The New York Herald-Tribune, an "affront to the intelligence." But the
reviews were not uniformly hostile. Characterizing the movie as "basically
serious and bitter," Bosley Crowther of The New York Times warned that
"those who go expecting to laugh at it may find themselves remaining to
weep." For some, the film became a cause - James Agee wrote a three-part
defense in The Nation - although it wasn't much help that the most
unambiguously positive review ran in The Daily Worker ("a brilliant comedy
whose deep message will stir the hearts and minds of liberty-loving peoples
all over the world").
"Monsieur Verdoux" lasted less than a month at the Broadway and, soon after
the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio called for a national ban, United
Artists withdrew the movie from release. By mid-June Representative Rankin
was demanding Chaplin's deportation; expecting to be brought before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, Chaplin linked his movie to the
impending investigation. He sent an open telegram to the committee's
chairman, suggesting that he simply view the movie. "It is against war and
futile slaughter," he wrote. "I am not a Communist. I am a peacemonger."
Few films have been as polarizing. The day after Catholic War Veterans urged
a federal investigation into Chaplin's political activities, the National
Board of Review voted "Monsieur Verdoux" best picture of 1947.
For all its intellectual defenders, however, "Monsieur Verdoux" grossed a
pitiful $162,000 at the box office. Thus humiliated, Chaplin refused to
allow the movie to be revived. By the time it reappeared at the Plaza
Theater in July 1964, with Chaplin long since relocated to Switzerland, it
was a film-buff legend, greeted with anticipatory excitement and capacity
crowds.
Rereleased within months of the apocalyptic farce "Dr. Strangelove" and with
Senator Barry Goldwater the presumptive Republican presidential candidate,
Chaplin's dark comedy struck a responsive chord. The Village Voice critic
Andrew Sarris linked this contemporary acceptance to the popularization of
sick humor: "If 1947 audiences were too reluctant to laugh at the cruelty in
'Monsieur Verdoux,' today's crowds may be too eager."
While never enjoying the canonical status of "The Gold Rush" or "City
Lights," "Monsieur Verdoux" did rise in critical esteem over the course of a
long and unpopular war. The movie's fortunes have since faded, but, learning
that its American rights had lapsed, a Brooklyn film programmer, Jacob
Perlin, managed to relicense them. Mr. Perlin, 32, said he was struck by the
film's prescience, citing the government's "murderous public policy" and the
profits generated by corporations like Halliburton and Blackstone.
"Monsieur Verdoux" may once again be timely, but the audacity of its
statement derives less from Chaplin's antiwar polemic than from his
antiheroic pose. No star ever took a greater risk with his public image or
more directly challenged his audience. If Chaplin ridiculed Hitler by
transforming him into the Little Tramp, he did something far more disturbing
in socializing the Little Tramp. "By his very existence," Bazin noted,
Verdoux "renders society guilty." Approaching eternity, the convicted killer
subtly reverts to the Tramp's distinctive gait. Has humanity sunk to this?
In the movie's ultimate gag it becomes apparent that, as Bazin wrote, "They're
going to guillotine Charlie!"
J. Hoberman is senior film critic for The Village Voice.
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archivehttp://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com

but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue  of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success."

On what are you basing this?  I've always been given to believe, based
on Theodore Huff (who was writing less than two years after the fact),
that "City Lights" was indeed a big hit on its rerelease in 1950 --
although Robinson in his bio doesn't seem to even mention the reissue.
Tom Moran

I don't have b.o. data, but I do have anecdotal evidence from multiple
sources. A theater owner in Phoenix told me he had to shut down
because of the uproar and boycots after he booked the CL reissue. My
grandfather said he wanted to see if audience response still held up
but the booking was ended prematurely and he missed the chance. Others
have told me their parents had experiences similar to what Rob cited.
Maybe I'm wrong, but given that environment it's kinda hard to imagine
a "huge popular success." Critically speaking, that's a different
story. Life Magazine did call it (the reissue) the best film of 1950.

[Jim Beaver]

"David Totheroh" <***@aol.com> wrote in message news:63e48526-96b6-45eb-b487-***@d45g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
I don't have b.o. data, but I do have anecdotal evidence from multiple
sources. A theater owner in Phoenix told me he had to shut down
because of the uproar and boycots after he booked the CL reissue. My
grandfather said he wanted to see if audience response still held up
but the booking was ended prematurely and he missed the chance. Others
have told me their parents had experiences similar to what Rob cited.
Maybe I'm wrong, but given that environment it's kinda hard to imagine
a "huge popular success." Critically speaking, that's a different
story. Life Magazine did call it (the reissue) the best film of 1950.
---------------------------
RESPONSE:

CITY LIGHTS got a slow release around the country, from April 8, 1950 in
South Carolina through October 11, 1952 (!) in Arizona. It was showing
somewhere in the U.S. pretty much continuously for 2 1/2 years, even after
Chaplin's departure and exile from the U.S. in September, 1952.

Some interesting clips:

ASSOCIATED PRESS (in Pasco, Washington Tri-City Courier), June 6, 1950:
Charlie Chaplin is working into the night on his new movie script. He has
cancelled all social engagements in order to get the new turn ready for
early production. It could be that he is heartened by the success of the
"City Lights" re-issue.

Hedda Hopper's column, SAN ANTONIO LIGHT, July 9, 1950: What goes on at the
Four-Star theater, where Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights" is playing, is not
funny. Eight per cent of the audience cheer Chaplin; hiss Gen. MacArthur in
the newsreel, and applaud the Commies in Korea. After the show, jerks barge
up to you and try to force you to sign for world peace (?). Looks like
Charlie's friends are out in force, and have opened up a second front on
Wilshire Blvd.

OGDEN STANDARD EXAMINER, June 11, 1950: Some time ago Charlie Chaplin was
the most talked of actor in Hollywood, both for his art and his private
life. But with it all no one has ever reached his pinnacle as a pantomimist.
He is considered by many as the greatest humorous mime of his day. His
picture, "City Lights" has been revived and is going great guns on Broadway.
It has been playing eight weeks and now has been moved to another theatre to
be run as long as New Yorkers will accept it. Its previous engagement
brought in $100,000 and it is anticipated that the show will pack them in
until well
into July.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, Corpus Christi Times, January 11, 1951: MEMPHIS, Tenn.,
Jan. 11. (AP)
- An 83-year-old movie censor has banned a 20-year-old movie because he
thinks its star, Charlie
Chaplin, is an enemy of "godliness in all Its forms." Lloyd T. Binford
yesterday announced a ban against "City Lights," which was shown here in the
early 30s and was recently rereleased by United Artists. "There's nothing
wrong with the picture," Binford said. But because of Chaplin's character
and
reputation, we don't think the picture should be shown again." Binford has
called the famed comedian "a traitor to the Christian American way of life"
and an enemy of decency, virtue and marriage.

This article on the Memphis ban is the only article I could find in a
nationwide text search of newspapers between 1950 and 1952 to mention
anything whatsoever of anyone banning or canceling the film. Indeed, the
vast majority of scores of articles commented on how successful CITY LIGHTS
was in its revival.

FYI.

Jim Beaver

[Matt Barry]

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m
but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success." There was a
very limited reissue of most of the major films to coincide with the
publication of My Autobiography in 1964. Then, in the early '70s,
mostly as a result of a new distribution contract, there was another
wave of screenings. Although very popular with film history buffs,
neither of those rereleases could accurately be called "huge."
All that is admittedly domestic U.S. reality. But since the negative
reception of Monsieur Verdoux discussed in the article was pretty much
limited to the U.S., it hardly makes sense to contrast a more
favorable reception internationally, where Chaplin's reputation
remained pretty much untainted by the anti-communist hysteria that
permeated the U.S. in the '50s.

I'd never read anything about the "City Lights" reissue being a "huge
popular success", but it did come at a time when Chaplin was very highly
regarded among international critics (witness the high ranking of both "The
Gold Rush" and "City Lights" in the first Sight and Sound poll two years
later).

Speaking of reissue screenings, wasn't there talk several years ago of
theatrical re-releases, at least of the major Chaplin films? It may have
been announced in conjunction with the Warner DVD releases, but I never
heard anything more about it.

[Feuillade]

Post by Matt Barry

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m
but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success." There was a
very limited reissue of most of the major films to coincide with the
publication of My Autobiography in 1964. Then, in the early '70s,
mostly as a result of a new distribution contract, there was another
wave of screenings. Although very popular with film history buffs,
neither of those rereleases could accurately be called "huge."
All that is admittedly domestic U.S. reality. But since the negative
reception of Monsieur Verdoux discussed in the article was pretty much
limited to the U.S., it hardly makes sense to contrast a more
favorable reception internationally, where Chaplin's reputation
remained pretty much untainted by the anti-communist hysteria that
permeated the U.S. in the '50s.

I'd never read anything about the "City Lights" reissue being a "huge
popular success", but it did come at a time when Chaplin was very highly
regarded among international critics (witness the high ranking of both "The
Gold Rush" and "City Lights" in the first Sight and Sound poll two years
later).
Speaking of reissue screenings, wasn't there talk several years ago of
theatrical re-releases, at least of the major Chaplin films? It may have
been announced in conjunction with the Warner DVD releases, but I never
heard anything more about it.
--
Matt Barry
View my films at:www.youtube.com/comedyfilm
Read my blog at:http://filmreel.blogspot.com- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

"Monsieur Verdoux" is in release now -- has played around the country
and will be at the Film Forum in Manhattan for a week starting
tomorrow.

Tom Moran

[Matt Barry]

Post by Feuillade

Post by Matt Barry

Post by David Totheroh

Post by sir m
but then several years later there was the huge popular success with
the reissue of CITY LIGHTS

Not sure exactly what you're talking about. City Lights was rereleased
in April of 1950 and was hardly a "huge popular success." There was a
very limited reissue of most of the major films to coincide with the
publication of My Autobiography in 1964. Then, in the early '70s,
mostly as a result of a new distribution contract, there was another
wave of screenings. Although very popular with film history buffs,
neither of those rereleases could accurately be called "huge."
All that is admittedly domestic U.S. reality. But since the negative
reception of Monsieur Verdoux discussed in the article was pretty much
limited to the U.S., it hardly makes sense to contrast a more
favorable reception internationally, where Chaplin's reputation
remained pretty much untainted by the anti-communist hysteria that
permeated the U.S. in the '50s.

I'd never read anything about the "City Lights" reissue being a "huge
popular success", but it did come at a time when Chaplin was very highly
regarded among international critics (witness the high ranking of both "The
Gold Rush" and "City Lights" in the first Sight and Sound poll two years
later).
Speaking of reissue screenings, wasn't there talk several years ago of
theatrical re-releases, at least of the major Chaplin films? It may have
been announced in conjunction with the Warner DVD releases, but I never
heard anything more about it.
--
Matt Barry
View my films at:www.youtube.com/comedyfilm
Read my blog at:http://filmreel.blogspot.com- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -

"Monsieur Verdoux" is in release now -- has played around the country
and will be at the Film Forum in Manhattan for a week starting
tomorrow.
Tom Moran

Thanks for the heads up! I'm going to make every effort to get up there next
week to see it. I've been looking for an excuse to take a day trip to
Manhattan, and this is definitely worth it.