Sunday, August 20, 2006
TWISTED HERO
I didn't like today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film very much.
Charles Chaplin was the star. He also directed and even composed the music for this tedious anti-hero dark comedy.
It is in the depression. He is a 'blue-beard' type killer trying to make a buck for his real family; marrying older women and knocking them off. The wife is in a wheelchair and the kid is saccharine cute.
All the widows are shrill, ugly, trolls.
I don't think this attempt to nullify the sin quite works.
I don't know why this is on the Best List.
Maybe it is his acting which is superb.
Perhaps it is because of the quality of the production which is very high.
I suspect, though, that it is an iconic niche listing. "We can't have a Best List without Chaplin" kind of thing. And the list doesn't include silents.
To tell the truth, I never liked the silent Chaplin that much and the talking one is even less appealing.
I found the whole exercise a dreary one with few laughs and a lot of yawns.
One of his women is Martha Raye whose schtick was crudity (not the salad kind). Raye was a homely woman with a very large mouth. She made the most of her defects through over the top performance.
I never cared for her very much either.
There is also some political rhetoric in here as well. Verdoux defends his behavior by pointing out that the big guys are killing on a mass scale every day.
There are even newsreels to show us that he is not as bad as Hitler or Mussolini.
It is a kind of twisted rationale and I didn't buy.
That leaves me with a 2 out of Netflix5.
It has been a while since I went that low.
And I am an easy grader.
