Can you buy the state­ment “Mur­der is the log­i­cal exten­sion of busi­ness” ? Yes, it’s the idea of the pro­tag­o­nist, Mon­sieur Ver­doux. [ ஃப்ரென்ச் சென்ட் பேர் மாதிரி இல்லை ? ]

Ver­doux is the name of the skilled hero and Mon­sieur is just the title to the name [ equal to Mr in Eng­lish — pro­nounced “meu ssi eu” ]. I used to come across this word used by traf­fic police, when I ride in one way or stop beyond the stop-line in Pondicherry [ மிஸ்ஸெ.. எங்க‌ போறீங்க‌ ஒன்வேல‌ ? ]. Why French title ? First rea­son is that Chap­lin movies were banned in US for his polit­i­cal incli­na­tion towards com­mu­nism. Sec­ond is that the story is about a real-life ser­ial mur­derer in France [ named Desire Lan­dru ] and the screen­play adap­ta­tion has also France as the place.

I don’t remem­ber see­ing any of the talkies of Char­lie Chap­lin. The last film, I saw was Mod­ern times. This film was intro­duced by SRa­makr­ish­nan, almost a year back. The inter­est­ing part of the film is that Chap­lin is the script writer, protagonist,music com­poser and the director.

Plot

Ver­doux is a com­mon man who lives in France, with his wife and kid. He looses his bank job and finds a strange method of mak­ing money. He trav­els fre­quently across France in dif­fer­ent names and lives dif­fer­ent roles. His tar­get is any rich widow woman and their unac­counted money. He man­ages to con­vince the dif­fer­ent ladies of his life at dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. There’s a sub­plot when Ver­doux exper­i­ments his newly for­mu­lated poi­son on a lonely girl, he finds in streets. Mean­while, affected peo­ple start com­plain­ing about him and the detec­tives get into action. One detec­tive finds our hero, almost. In fact, he arrests him. We expect Ver­doux to react aggres­sively for the arrest. No ! He reacts in a dif­fer­ent man­ner. After all, he is a cool murderer.

Good things don’t pro­long in life. While he tried to marry the nth rich lady in life, he gets trapped in a sit­u­a­tion and escapes. Econ­omy crashes dur­ing the world war and Ver­doux looses his money and fam­ily from him. He meets some­one on the road, whom he thought dif­fer­ently in the begin­ning. Police finds him and what hap­pens is the end.

View

I found the root dia­logue of ’”கொலை குத்த‌ம்னா.. யுத்த‌மும் குத்த‌ம். Isn’t it ?!” of Hey Ram. Check this dia­logue in this Chaplin’s film “One mur­der makes a vil­lain; mil­lions, a hero. Num­bers sanc­tify, my good fel­low!” — In fact it was taken from another 17th cen­tury reformer. Do you the root of kurud­hipunal dia­logue “Every­one has a break­ing point ” — It’s from “12 Angry men”. Not only films.. their dia­logues also travel across the borders.

All his career, Chap­lin did his reg­u­lar tramp char­ac­ter, edited in fast sequence, type of movies. This movie is extremely unusual from all his ear­lier works. But he couldn’t come out of his char­ac­ter fully in this movie — doing com­pletely a seri­ous role. Some­times, verdoux’s body lan­guage changes to Chaplin’s tramp char­ac­ter. His char­ac­ter­i­za­tion involves mul­ti­ple roles — A calm fam­ily man, bank clerk, cap­tain, busi­ness man, lover, philoso­pher, a clever investor and on top the com­mon man who fights against the sys­tem to save his family.

Though he gets the money in an uneth­i­cal man­ner, he behaves as a per­fect fam­ily man at home. He never gets tensed. He instructs his kid to be kind with pets. A sin­gle sequence is used in this film to explain about his past job — he counts the stolen money at the speed of an auto­matic count­ing machine ! . I liked the sequence where he invites a poor girl to his home, for test­ing his newly formed poi­son. The sequence that fol­low was very inter­est­ing and the dia­logues too.

The way he faces the detec­tive was also an inter­est­ing part of the movie. Some­how, he takes the story to a com­i­cal one and ends the story with a good note. The boat sequences and the wed­ding party sequences are enjoy­able one [ I laughed ! ]. Inter­est­ingly, the dia­logue por­tion is too good as it involves about love, phi­los­o­phy and eco­nom­ics. I am not sure whether this movie is remade in Tamil — but I rec­ol­lect that a still of MRRadha [ in the cover of MRRad­hayanam book ] resem­bles the way Chap­lin posed for this movie. MRR is the only capa­ble artist who could have done this in Tamil, swimmingly.

One fine dia­log to end with.

Priest : May the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Henri Ver­doux : Why not? After all, it belongs to Him.

Sim­ple n good movie.

:)

–Toto.

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