City of Nets (58 page)

The censors listed and explained, as was their profession, all the immoralities that could not be tolerated. When one of Verdoux's wives asked him to “come to bed,” for example, the censors asked Chaplin to change it to “go to bed.” More difficult was Verdoux's encounter with a young prostitute, whom he planned to poison simply to test the efficacy of a new drug, but then befriended, fed, paid, and sent home. The censors objected to any suggestion that the girl was actually a prostitute. They objected to Verdoux asking her, “How long have you been at this game?” or expressing the view that “an attractive girl like you would have done better.” When the girl first reacted to Verdoux's offers of help by saying, “What is this, the Salvation Army?” the censors stiffly declared that “the reference to the Salvation Army is likely, in our opinion, to give offense to that group.” Toward the end of the movie, Verdoux once again encountered the girl, now fashionably dressed and riding in a limousine provided by a munitions maker (another touch of Brecht, or perhaps the Shaw of
Major Barbara
). “Please inject into the dialogue some reference to the munitions manufacturer as the girl's fiancé,” the censors said, “this to avoid the suggestion that the girl is now a kept woman.”

It was quite possible that the Johnston Office saw its work entirely in terms of references to “illicit sex”; it is also quite possible that it really opposed the movie on political grounds but waged the battle on questions of sex because that was its basic mandate from the producers. In any case, Chaplin had to argue about each of the censors' objections. He had his most difficult time with one of Breen's assistants, “a tall, dour young man,” according to Chaplin's recollections, who asked, “What have you against the Catholic Church?” Chaplin countered by inquiring, “Why do you ask?” The dour young man slammed the script of
Monsieur Verdoux
onto a table and started thumbing through it to find the penultimate scene, in which a priest visited Verdoux in his death cell. Why did Chaplin make Verdoux address the priest as “my good man”?

“Well, isn't he a good man?” Chaplin parried.

“That's facetious . . .” said the censor. “You don't call a priest ‘a good man,' you call him ‘Father.' ”

“Very well, we'll call him ‘Father,' ” Chaplin said.

And so on. How could Chaplin have made Verdoux say, “I am at peace with God, my conflict is with man”? How could he have made Verdoux say, “Who knows what sin is, born as it was from Heaven, from God's fallen angel, who knows what mysterious destiny it serves?”

“I believe that sin is just as great a mystery as virtue,” Chaplin said.

“That's a lot of pseudo-philosophizing . . .” the censor said. “And this line, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.' And Verdoux says, ‘Why not? After all it belongs to Him.' ”

“What's wrong with that?” Chaplin asked.

“ ‘Why not?' You don't talk to a priest like that. . . . You impugn society and the whole state.”

There it was. Chaplin impugned society and the whole state. But Breen himself, in contrast to his young assistant, was ready to be reasonable. He was tired of all these arguments, always the same. In one pitiful complaint that summed up all his conflicts with Hollywood's more pretentious filmmakers, he said to Chaplin, “Don't make the girl another prostitute. Almost every script in Hollywood has a prostitute.”

Chaplin confessed that he “felt embarrassed” that he had indulged in such a cliché. He “promised not to stress the fact.” When the film was actually made, in a remarkably brief twelve weeks, and then shown to representatives of the Catholic Legion of Decency and other “religious groups of various denominations,” Breen approved, and swept others along in his approval. “It's okay—we can let it go, eh?” Breen said. “All right, Charlie, go ahead.” It had been nearly a decade since
The Great Dictator,
which had made a lot of money, and Chaplin thought
Monsieur Verdoux
would do just as well. He gave a private showing of the finished film to some of his most distinguished friends in Hollywood, and Thomas Mann, for one, stood up and applauded.

Chaplin seemed unaware of how rapidly the postwar political winds were changing. While he was editing
Monsieur Verdoux,
a United States marshal telephoned him to announce that he was being summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Chaplin didn't seem to mind, or didn't seem to feel threatened, or didn't admit to feeling threatened. When his summons was mysteriously postponed, and then postponed again, he sent the committee a defiant telegram. “
FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE I WILL TELL YOU WHAT I THINK YOU WANT TO KNOW
,” the telegram said. “
I AM NOT A COMMUNIST, NEITHER HAVE I EVER JOINED ANY POLITICAL PARTY OR ORGANIZATION IN MY LIFE
. . . .” The committee politely thanked him for his telegram and said it was not interested in questioning him after all. One of the committee's most powerful Democrats, John Rankin of Mississippi, nonetheless attacked him for having allegedly “refused” to become an American citizen, and for making “loathsome pictures” that might corrupt American youth.
*

The New York premiere of
Monsieur Verdoux
in April of 1947 filled Chaplin with foreboding. There was “an uneasy atmosphere in the theatre that night, a feeling that the audience had come to prove something,” he recalled. Some people laughed, but there were hisses too, and even the laughter seemed to Chaplin like a “challenging laughter against the hissing faction.” He sat writhing in his seat, twisting his program to shreds, then whispered to his wife, Oona, that he was going out into the lobby. “I can't take it,” he said. He prowled around the lobby for a while, “torn between listening for laughs and getting away from it all.” He crept up into the gallery to check the audience there, and everywhere he found the same kind of nervous laughter, joyless laughter.

The next day, Chaplin held a press conference. The publicity staff at United Artists doubted the wisdom of this maneuver, for the press had been fairly hostile ever since the Joan Barry trial, but Chaplin insisted. In the packed ballroom of the Gotham Hotel, Chaplin made the fatal error, at the very beginning, of appearing on the defensive. “Proceed with the butchery . . .” he said with leaden humor. “Fire ahead at this old gray head.” After a few skirmishing questions, a woman seated near the front made a blunt demand: “Are you a Communist?”

“I am not a Communist!” Chaplin said.

“A Communist sympathizer was the question,” someone else said, though that had not been the question.

“A Communist sympathizer . . . ?” Chaplin echoed. “I don't know what you mean by a ‘Communist sympathizer.' I'd say this—that during the war, I sympathized very much with Russia because I believe that she was holding the front . . . that she helped contribute a considerable amount of fighting and dying to bring victory to the Allies.”

This opened the gate for James W. Fay, a representative of a publication called
Catholic War Veterans,
who began hectoring Chaplin for his frequent statement that he considered himself a citizen not of any one country but of the world. “Mr. Chaplin,” Fay proclaimed, “the men who secured the beachheads, the men who advanced in the face of enemy fire, and the poor fellows who were drafted like myself, and their families and buddies, resent that remark.”

Chaplin got flustered. He invoked his own sons—“two of them were on those beachheads.” He stammered apologies. “Nevertheless, I—I—I've done my share,” he pleaded, “and whatever I said, it is not by any means to be meant derogatory to your Catholic—uh—uh—uh—GI's.”

Such apologies only whetted the reporters' appetites, and so there followed a barrage of questions like “What were the things you did do for the war effort?” And did he know Hanns Eisler, and “are you aware of the fact that his brother is the Soviet agent, so attested by—?”

At about this time, there came a rumble of protest from the balcony, and a shaggy-haired film critic rose to ask a shaggy-haired question. “How does it feel to be an artist who has enriched the world with so much happiness and understanding of the little people, and to be derided and held up to hate and scorn by the so-called representatives of the press?”

“I'm sorry, I didn't follow you, you'll have to repeat that question again,” Chaplin said, startled and pleased at such an expression of support.

“I don't know if I can,” said James Agee, who reviewed movies for
Time,
and for
The Nation,
and for himself. The only transcript of the press conference failed to catch much of Agee's original declaration, and his restatement of it verges on the incoherent: “What are people who care a damn about freedom—who really care for it—think of a country and the people in it, who congratulate themselves upon this country as the finest on earth and as a ‘free country,' when so many of the people in this country pry into what a man's citizenship is, try to tell him his business from hour to hour.” Chaplin was touched. He could think of nothing to answer except, “No comment, but thank you.”

Agee praised
Monsieur Verdoux
in
Time
as “one of the most notable films in years.” If it was not the finest of all Chaplin pictures, “it is certainly the most fascinating,” and Chaplin's playing of the title role was “one of the most beautiful single performances ever put on film.” Agee then wrote a series of three reviews in
The Nation,
not only praising “the great poet and his great poem,” but attacking all Chaplin's detractors. The unfavorable reviews, he said, were “of interest . . . chiefly as a definitive measure of the difference between the thing a man of genius puts before the world and the things the world is equipped to see in it.”

Well, we must forgive passionate critics their passions. If
Monsieur Verdoux
was unworthy of Agee's enthusiasm, it was still far better than the carping of lesser critics indicated. The carping was nonetheless understandable, for
Monsieur Verdoux
was a very unpleasant film, bitter, sour, cruel. When Chaplin abandoned his beloved tramp in
The Great Dictator,
he preserved a recognizable variant in the little barber, and the barber's impassioned speech at the close provided a happy ending of sorts. But Verdoux, the seducer and murderer of friendless women, was a monster. Prissy, with a prissy little mustache and a prissy little accent, he represented the murderer as pervert. Verdoux loved his real wife and child, to be sure, and loved pets too, but so did the ultimate prissy mass-murderer, Heinrich Himmler.

Yet Chaplin wanted his audience to sympathize with Verdoux, to identify with him, share in his monstrous crimes and his monstrous justifications of those crimes. And though we tend to see Verdoux's killings in the context of the Holocaust, Chaplin went a step further and insisted that Verdoux's killings mirrored not just the massacres of the recent past but the massacres of the imminent future, the atomic bomb, our weapon, and therefore us. No, the critics insisted, that was too much. The only thing worse than Chaplin's accusations was his caprice in ornamenting his accusations with brilliant slapstick. To take the volcanically absurd figure of Martha Raye out into the deep in a rowboat (would Theodore Dreiser have enjoyed the parody created by the man who had been a pallbearer at his funeral?), to creep up on her with a hangman's noose, to retreat at the last moment because of some Swiss yodelers—could such a film be taken seriously? Well, what is serious? Chaplin might have asked. He himself billed
Monsieur Verdoux
as “a comedy of murder.”

Monsieur Verdoux
did well at the box office for a few weeks, then began to falter. This was probably a consequence of the first viewers disliking the movie and telling their friends to avoid it, but Chaplin put most of the blame on right-wing pressure groups. He recalled a United Artists executive showing him a picture in the
New York Daily News
of the New Jersey Catholic Legion picketing outside a theater with signs saying “Chaplin's a fellow traveler” and “Send Chaplin to Russia.” Chaplin said that bookings all over the country were canceled after the American Legion threatened to boycott any theater that showed a Chaplin film. In Denver, Legion threats closed
Monsieur Verdoux
just one night after it opened. After six weeks of this, Chaplin angrily withdrew the film from distribution and didn't show it again in the United States for nearly twenty years. He remained convinced, though, that it was “the cleverest and most brilliant film I have yet made.”

 

Here is one last note on Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, which is now, perhaps inevitably, the Flamingo Hilton. It is all very up-to-date, with rows of computerized poker games and so on, except for those aspects that are relentlessly anachronistic, like the Gay Nineties bartenders in their red string neckties and the weary waitresses in décolletage and black net stockings. Throughout the windowless casinos that never close, the main sound is the clicking of the gambling machines and the dead voices of the men who tend them.

Las Vegas today is what hell might be like if hell had been planned and built by New York gangsters. It is the kingdom of pleasure, where everything is permitted, then perverted and parodied. Where pleasure is defined (as in
Mahagonny
) in terms of indulgences for sale, gambling, whiskey, prostitution. Where thousands of tourists are herded into a row of garish hotels and encouraged to squander their money in joyless revelry until it is all gone. Pleasure grimly organized and sold, around the clock, mass produced and mass consumed—what could be more hellish than a gangster vision of paradise?