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Monsieur Verdoux (United Artists), Charles Spencer Chaplin's first film since The Great Dictator (1940), is the story of a middle-aged French bank clerk who loses his job during a depression. Tenderly devoted to his invalid wife, his little boy, and their security, and disastrously ill-equipped to fend for them in a prolapsed economy, he nevertheless manages to set up in business for himself. The business: murder.

His victims are stupid, wealthy women. His difficult task is to woo them, marry them, pry their money loose, murder them, dispose of the corpses, and invest his take. He is exceedingly hardworking, skillful and, in his way, ethical at his job; he takes the least possible emotional advantage of his victims, and he is careful to kill them painlessly.

He gets a certain esthetic pleasure out of his work, but on the whole it is distasteful and tiring; whenever he can, which is all too rarely, he escapes from the hurly-burly of breadwinning and relaxes at the lovely home his efforts secure.

Like many a man who drives a ruthless bargain, M. Verdoux has his good side. He exhibits an exquisite gentleness toward children, the sick and the maimed, and even the humblest animals. He spares one prospective victim (a new Chaplin protege named Marilyn Nash), when he learns that she is the widow of a disabled war veteran and shares his burning pity for the helpless. He fails to close his deals with certain other clients too. He makes several brilliantly funny attempts on the life of rambunctious Martha Raye, but she was born lucky and is plainly indestructible. He nibbles interminably toward the heart and pocketbook of rich, socialite Widow Isobel Elsom--and is all but caught in his hazardous career as he is about to marry her.

Long after he has lost his family and, heartbroken, has retired from "business," he does get caught. By this time he is firmly convinced that good & evil are inextricably mingled--and has come to believe that he is not more essentially evil than good.

"Numbers Sanctify." Chaplin has remarked that Verdoux paraphrases Clausewitz' idea that the logical extension of diplomacy is war. Verdoux's version: "The logical extension of business is murder." War, he tells the court which condemns him, is merely a grandiose multiplication of the crime he is dying for. But wholesale murder is condoned by the state. "Numbers . . ." (of killed men), he tells the fat-mouthed journalist who interviews him in his death cell, "numbers sanctify." An earnest priest, his last offices rejected, murmurs solemnly, "May God have mercy on your soul." "Why not?" replies M. Verdoux. "After all, it belongs to Him"--and walks out to be guillotined, away from the camera, down that straight road where most Chaplin movies end.

Monsieur Verdoux has serious shortcomings, both as popular entertainment and as a work of art. But whatever its shortcomings, it is one of the most notable films in years. It is not the finest picture Chaplin ever made, but it is certainly the most fascinating.

If it had no other virtues--and it has many--the film is a daring individual gesture, dared in an era when such acts are rare. One of the world's most inspired and most popular artists--a man who for decades has delighted people of all races, from children to highbrows--now deliberately releases a film which almost nobody can wholly like. Many will detest the product and despise Chaplin for producing it. He has replaced his beloved, sure-fire tramp with an equally original, but far less engaging character--a man whose grace and arrogance alone would render him suspect with the bulk of the non-Latin world. He has gone light on pure slapstick and warm laughter, and has borne down on moral complexity, terror and irony with an intensity never before attempted in films. At a time when many people have regained their faith in war under certain conditions and in free enterprise under any conditions whatever, he has ventured to insist, as bitterly as he knows how, that there are considerable elements of criminality implicit in both.

Magnificence & Muddle. Unlike most of the few films which try with any honesty to say anything remotely worth saying, this one does not, in its last reel or so, duck out from under. In Chaplin's last minutes, instead, he opens up with his heaviest guns, and sticks by them to the bitter end. In the whole two hours of the film, there is not one instant of bidding in any shabby way for the audience's sympathy. Morally alone, this is a remarkable thing to have done.

Artistically, the film is no less extraordinary. It has its blurs and failures. Finely cut and paced as it is, the picture goes on so long, and under such darkness and chill, that the lazier-minded type of cinemagoers will probably get tired. Chaplin overexerts, and apparently overestimates, a writing talent which, though vigorous and unconventional, weighs light beside his acting gifts. As a result, a good deal of the verbal and philosophic straining seems inadequate, muddled and highly arguable --too highbrow for general audiences, and too naive for the highbrows.

A majority of Manhattan critics found the film baffling, disappointing, offensive, and, in stretches, plain boring. But a few enjoyed the subtle, tragicomic ironies germinated by Chaplin's powers of intuition, of pure feeling, and of observation. The set pieces of pure slapstick are as skilled and delightful, and as psychologically penetrating, as any Chaplin has ever contrived. The casting (including Victim Margaret .Hoffman) is excellent and there are a couple of dozen fine pieces of characterization and acting, notably by Isobel Elsom and Martha Raye. Working with a new character, and adapting his old, mute artfulness to a medium new and basically hostile to him, Chaplin still has his sure virtuosity; his is one of the most beautiful single performances ever put on film.

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