Chaplin
1947
2 Hours
I just erased, in error, a very through review, and do not have the wakefulness to repeat it. A magnificent film, a critical and commercial failure that Chaplin described as “the cleverest and most brilliant of my career”.
Verdoux loses his position as a bank clerk to the depression: a position he has held for 30 years. He becomes a ‘blue bears’, a serial killer, seducing middle aged women and making the disappear when he is able to obtain their assets. This all to support, in middle class comfort, a young son and disabled wife.
The marvelous horror of it comes when the final market crash ruins hinm completely, despite his disparate methods of seduction and murder. The film than jumps to him as older, and worn out, and he describes how his wife and so did not survive the market crash. One suspects that, having used the most desperate measures to obtain the ignorant tranquil happiness of his family, he himself killed them to spare them the impossible but inevitable downturn that would have followed. Thus we see, like a great tower, the pride, even in his middle class standing, of this middle class hero and villain.
Filed under: 1960's, Bergman, Ingmar, Cinematheque, Sweden, Uncategorized
Ingmar Bergman
BW, 95 min, Swedish w/ subtitles 1964
Cinematheque, June 2005
Went alone however ran into Zsuzsa on the way out.
Two sister, beautiful, one ill, one with a son perhaps 10. They are on a train, than a hotel. Zsuzsa said that what she liked about it was that it portrayed people as we very rarely see them portrayed – when ill alone, dying. The woman I assume had cancer or something. Ester is sick, Anna feels revenge against her and finds solace in going out and sleeping with some random man. The boy runs in the halls of the extremely elegant hotel.
I didn’t like the movie very much, although a fair amount of it was beautiful to look at. The suffering was dwelled on too much; the close-ups are too close and too long. It becomes not only a picture of morbidity but somewhat morbid itself. I do not mind the portrayal of sickness – but I do not want me, and the director, to be a part of that sickness as well. Some bland/over-wrought/affected European-art sexuality, between the sister and with regard to the escape to the random sexual partner.
OK. Nice to see Zsuzsa.
Zsuzsa says to see CRIES AND WHISPERS on June 25, I do not know if I will go or not.
