Monsieur Verdoux

A man who loses his bank job after thirty years starts marrying wealthy women and killing them to support his family. He does it like a profession, keeping books. The film presents the murders as comedy, and that is not its target: in his closing defence the character says that killing one by one is a crime while killing on a mass scale is business. After the war that line became a problem for the film. Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed and starred, abandoning the tramp entirely and speaking. The idea came originally from Orson Welles. Before watching: it was received coldly in America and, together with Chaplin's political position at the time, its distribution was obstructed. It is now counted among his harshest films, but it will not satisfy anyone who came to laugh.