THE SCREEN: The Lady Killer
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
was theatrical: by basing itself in spurious melodrama, by introducing distractions in the form of coincidences, and, in essence, by drawing attention away from what was going on, it made one...
...And Pierre, the rich man without feelings, is also probably the person whom Charlie himself feared success and fame would make him...
...was theatrical: by basing itself in spurious melodrama, by introducing distractions in the form of coincidences, and, in essence, by drawing attention away from what was going on, it made one nearly impatient with it...
...And even in A Woman o/Paris, no matter how serious his original intentions may have been, this instinct couldn't be repressed...
...The occasion of his drubbing--perhaps the last on a really large scale, but in his case one can never be sure --will be the official publication of his memoirs, a fat tome with a price to match its bulk of $19.95...
...But since he was worded that audiences would be disappointed by his absence from the film, Chaplin tried to forestall a bad reaction with a preface explaining that he was here directing his "first serious drama...
...Pierre is the character on whon most of these troublesome props focus our attention The saxophone is in effect a metaphor for him, as is pearl necklace which Marie throws out a window a one point...
...The only career benefited by this film was that of Adolphe Menjou, who did indeed turn out to be someone Charlie might have feared he would be: come--someone who was to betray the socialist ideals and humanitarianism of Charlie's youth, During the period when Charlie had to go into exile from America, Menjou appeared before one of the Congressional witch hunts as a "co-operative witness...
...Unlike his predecessors Nixon was unable to carry off the records of his administration, a fact which might have prompted him to reach within for his personal history, but it does not appear to have done so...
...but we only see her reaction through the increasingly violent writhing of an outstretched hand which is being worked on by a masseuse...
...Pierre's talent for living is simply the Tramp's resilience turned decadent--his naivet6 and hope transformed into a sensibility that is nerveless and effete...
...Nothing he might have found to say in his own defense could save him from the mauling he can expect...
...But with his genius's instinct for what movies do best, he was continuously undercutting that melodrama, and its sentiment, with a comic by-play of objects...
...They ought to realize that while commerce can be oppressive, history is overwhelming, and the two do not always mix well, and sometimes explode on impact...
...Charlie's addiction to nymphettes is characteristic of the boulevardier's personality too...
...cinated Chaplin more...
...As a sketch on the mass-murderer Landru, Verdoux is Chaplin's ultimate parody of that deadly charm which he had first created twenty-five years earlier in ,Pierre.COLINL...
...Pierre has an equal ability not to be touched by them in the first place...
...Pierre, the suave boulevardier, is the person whom Charlie's Tramp, with his cut-away coat, wing collar and carnival cane used as a walking stick, aspires to be...
...There is a scene, for instance, where Marie (Purviance) accidentally meets her long-lost love from back home, Jean (Carl Miller...
...As th~ little saxophone he fools around with at Marie's apar Commonweal: 337 ment suggests, his relationship with her is for him a kind of playtime...
...Since he is the competition for her current lover Pierre (Menjou), their reunion is an emotional moment...
...WESTERBECK,JR...
...Though A Woman ol Paris may have been intendec as a vehicle for Purviance, it is clearly Pierre who fas...
...In one, he is visiting at her apartment and incongruously picking out a tune on a little soprano saxophone...
...No filmmaker has been more aware than Chaplin of the chance that art has to utilize objects in movies...
...And what ever happened to the Tramp...
...Then later, when a friend of Marie's has come to divulge an infidelity of Pierre's, she absent-mindedly uses the saxophone as an ashtray...
...When she threatens to leave him, he is philosophical and poised...
...In order to poke fun at a gourmet!s preference for high fowl, you have to be rich enough to know about such things...
...This is the per feet touch to establish the character of Pierre for u~, He is a bit gamy, an example of elegance that is over refined...
...Other scenes with Pierre function similarly...
...Between the flailing about of her fingers, whic]~ thereby become objects, and the saxophone-ashtray, thi., sad scene is hilarious...
...A certain amount of totemism surrounds it and for a long time to come it will remain sacred ground, but "Holocaust" is the sort of thing that makes dramatization seem trivial...
...Though intended to launch the stardom of Edna Purviance, A Woman oJ Paris killed off her career instead...
...This was in part because the film's unpopularity resulted from the feeling that she was too old to play the title role, which was ironic when you consider that Charlie's problem in real life was going in for gifts who were too young...
...When Maurice Chevalier sings "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," there is something decidedly perverse about his interest in them...
...Of course it does...
...Except that this womanizer, who at last wins all those hearts the Tramp has been wooing unsuccessfully for years, turns out in the end to be a real killer of ladies...
...Nor has any filmmaker been readier to exercise the otheradvantage film has over theater in this regard--the advantage of the re-take--in order to bring a sight gag to perfection...
...Always charming and a bit ironic, he is the comic by-play in this movie that undercuts the "serious drama" of Marie's relationship with Jean...
...It is even possible to see in Pierre a disaffected version of the Tramp...
...Well, he turned into the elegant person he always wanted to be, too...
...Chaplin would on occasion re-do a single shot dozens of times to get it" right...
...The whole scene is then played out around his efforts to keep her from noticing the impoverished state of his linen...
...Perhaps modern presidents have grown too dependent on speech writers and can no longer find their voice when the time comes to explain themselves...
...But Chaplin deflected it in another direction by having Jean give her with the coffee he offers her a napkin with a hole in it...
...In fact, the film differs from Charlie's other silent work not by being a "serious drama," but by being a comedy about a rich man rather than the poor one Charlie himself always played...
...Nearly all the commentary about "Holocaust" had nothing to do with the show at all, but about its subject, and whether the subject lends itself to dramatization...
...When she decides to come back to him, he is philosophical and poised...
...Today, it itself draws the first of what turn out to be many laughs in a film whose appeal isn't serious at all...
...In casting Menjou as the villainous French general in Paths of Glory afterwards, Stanley Kubrick was probably not far off the mark...
...Now that the film has been re-released, however, Chaplin's preface seems a puzzling document...
...It was bad enough before he resigned his office in disgrace in August, 1974, but it has been worse since, a venomous assault which 26 May 1978:3a8...
...The networks ought to be wary of cutting from scenes of the ovens of Auschwitz to commercials set in the ovens of Elm City, USA...
...The excerpts currently running in the New York Times and other papers have a doughy, toneless quality characteristic of recent presidential memoirs...
...Everyone el~ flinches when it passes under his nose...
...In creating the Tramp Chaplin had of course made his art out of the poverty of his own early life, and in creating Pierre he was only following throughmmaking a movie out of what his more recent successes in life had taught him...
...Other presidents were the target of public abuse---FDR was attacked as a traitor to his class~ Eisenhower dismissed as a golf-crazy reader of Western novels, Johnson denounced as a war criminal--but none have had to suffer quite the vituperative savagery aimed at Nixon...
...THE MAULING OF NINON 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PiIIBS A notable American figure is going to take quite a beating in the press over the next six weeks...
...Unfortunately, the audience was dis~ appointed anyway, so Chaplin withdrew the film from circulation...
...This is not to say that straight drama won't play in movies, or that Chaplin never attempted it...
...And, in a commercial enterprise, tragicomic...
...A softerhearted people might find a word or two in his defense, or concede his achievements with a measure of generosity, or reflect that his deepest failing was a compulsion to repay animosity in kind, or admit that history may adjust a detail or two in the public portrait, but about the best Richard Nixon can expect is the observation that he was his own worst enemy...
...First he underwent a schizophrenic break-down in the thirties, half of him remaining the same old Tramp while the other half became Charlie's riotous parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator...
...While Marie agonizes over choosing bc tween him and Jean, and Jean goes through an agon of his own that ends in suicide, Pierre remains debonai detached, amused and, consequently, amusing...
...That is the potential harm of "docu-dramas:" not so much the banality of evil, but the evil of banality,rmLn, TmtZ~S THE LAJY KILIJEM @ 0 0 0900 0 O00 000 'lille SallLgal A Woman ol Paris, which Charlie Chaplin made in 1923, stars Edna Purviance as the mistress of a rich bon vivant (Adolphe Menjou...
...But then the Tramp dis-appeared altogether and was replaced by the title character in Monsieur Verdoux, who is a dapper womanizer like Pierre...
...In drama people come into conflict with each other, whereas in comedy they usually come into conflict with objects...
...Indeed, the first of these touches is intro duced into the film at the moment that Pierre himself is Invited to the kitchen of a restaurant to select the low he will eat, Pierre chooses one so high 'that only h~ and the chef can stand the stench of it...
...Purviance had played opposite Chaplin himself in many an earlier film, and he made this one as a tribute which would launch her on a career of her own...
...Thi noticeable corruption is his appeal, in fact, just as ! is the fowl's...
...But one must be honest about these things: the book itself is almost beside the point...
...Comedy therefore finds its natural medium in movies, in which props can have more function than on the stage because the distance from the spectator can be varied to show the prop clearly...
...The difference between drama and comedy is, in movies at least, simple...
...The Tramp has an incredible ability to spring back from life's rebuffs and tragedies...
...On the contrary, there is in Chaplin's comedies a prominent element of drama which derives from his sentimentality, his love of melodrama...
...Nixon is so widely and deeply disliked, his honor and capacity have been so thoroughly discredited, that even his very name has begun to seem a kind of expletive, like quisling...
...At the same time, though, the relationship between Charlie and Pierre has to have been more complicated than that...
...This scene ought, again, to be a painful one for Marie, and presumably it is...
...He has no more feeling than that fowl...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 11
