Monsieur Verdoux was Chaplin’s darkest comedy, in which he left the Tramp behind to play a charming murderer.
Monsieur Verdoux was released in 1947. Chaplin played Henri Verdoux, a former bank clerk who, after losing his job, married and murdered wealthy widows for their money, in order to support his wife and son. The idea for the story had come from Orson Welles, and Chaplin developed it into a black comedy about respectability, money and murder.
The film was unlike Chaplin’s earlier work. Verdoux was polite, witty and well dressed, and his crimes were presented with a cold logic: he argued that his murders were small compared with the killing done in war and in business. Audiences in 1947 were not ready for that argument, and the film was controversial and commercially unsuccessful in the United States, although it was better received in Europe.
Today Monsieur Verdoux is regarded as one of Chaplin’s most interesting later films. It showed that he was willing to challenge his audience, and to use comedy to ask uncomfortable questions. It also marked a break: after Verdoux, the Tramp would not return, and Chaplin’s films would become more openly concerned with the world around him.