Wes D. Gehring is so comfortably at home in the life and literature of Charlie Chaplin that we’re tempted to suspend judgment when he proposes an idea that doesn’t sound quite right. In Chaplin’s War Trilogy: An Evolving Lens in Three Dark Comedies, 1918-1947 (published by McFarland), he posits the existence of a “dark comedy war trilogy” consisting of Shoulder Arms (1918), The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
The problem comes down to definitions: how dark is the slapstick propaganda of Shoulder Arms and where’s the war in Monsieur Verdoux? And while we’re on the subject of words, do these three films, lacking the connecting threads of character or story lines, constitute a trilogy in any meaningful sense?
As Gehring acknowledges, Chaplin understood virtually all his films as tragi-comic; the humorous and the macabre were familiar bedfellows in The Kid (1921), when the Tramp considers tossing the baby he’s saddled with down a sewer grating, and The Gold Rush (1925), a comedy with a cannibalistic theme. The great contribution of Chaplain’s War Trilogy may be the recognition that Chapman’s beloved Tramp almost always cast a dark shadow. And yet, there is no Tramp in Monsieur Verdoux. In that film, Chaplain’s protagonist is a charming gentleman who seduces and murders women for their money. The real-life model for Verdoux conducted himself with “bemused audacity” in court, providing Chaplin with a tailor-made suit of ideas. During the real 1922 trial, the prosecutor compared the accused to “the Charlie Chaplain of crime.” But a war picture? Monsieur Verdoux is a war movie only in the sense that life is a battlefield.
Although Gehring’s thesis on Chaplain’s “dark comedy war trilogy” seems to exist only to justify writing a book on Chaplain, the result is an interesting enough account of the darker side of the star-filmmaker that all can be forgiven.
