"Monsieur Verdoux" (1947)

Charlie Chaplin credits Orson Welles for the idea for Monsieur Verdoux. The conversation very likely took place one late spring evening on Welles' rented yacht (to be used for The Lady from Shanghai), over roast lamb and a few bottles of Chateau Verdignan. Chaplin delicately asks the big man whether it would be constructive for the two to work together on a project. Welles responds that only if Charlie changed his act, he would oblige. Charlie blankly asks how on earth he could do that. Welles roars at him that he needs to learn how to be bad, in order to be good; Chaplin deserves a 'touch of evil' on his return to cinema. They make a bet: Welles wagers that Charlie can't play a strict heavy and endear him to the audience; Charlie bets he can. Welles comes up with the premise that if Charlie can make a bluebeard 'lovable', then he'll hand over his yacht to the comic. Chaplin rejoinders that the yacht doesn't belong to Welles since it's rented, and besides, Welles will need the yacht to get Rita in a bathing suit or lose a few filmgoers in the process... Rita walks in chirping and asks Orson and Charlie what they think of her new coiffure (Rita the redhead is a blonde.) Orson smiles roguishly at Charlie, and there the conversation ended.
...
Monsieur Verdoux is evidence that Chaplin won the bet: not only does he succeed in playing a vile character with outrageous charm and glee, but he manages to endow his tale, and ornament his character's principles, with judicious nobility. His triumph is all the more great for reason that M. Verdoux was made after a long 7 year drought for the maestro. All the Chaplinesque elements are installed, but they are used rather as scaffolding for his greater political & economic concerns. The philosophical asides that were suggested in his earliest films through kinetic poetry & effortless humor are in this film verbalized and accented by sound dialogue. Chaplin's Verdoux is a ridiculous man, whose ultra french caricature belies an englishman's wit, and whose absurdity reveals an occult wisdom gradually uncovered as the film proceeds to its gracious effect. In Chaplin's older age, a sagacity comes across through the strange peace that his later comic films demonstrate; perhaps Verdoux is the greatest of his late films for reason of its philosophic serenity (all the more remarkable for the vigorous intrigue and action at play in the film; i.e. the constant rushing to and fro of Verdoux, the running train motif to signify his manic travels, etc.) The film may have been born from a Wellesian idea: the abstruse, tragic villain, whose quixotic need for evildoing & deception exonerates him from any conventional moral imperatives - but whereas Welles works largely, with monolithic, frightfully giant steps as his tools, in Chaplin's hands, the villain's asides, which appear frivolous in the early passages, turn out to be instruments of destiny so meticulously leveled as to raise wonder at their unexpected perspicacity. Chaplin comes across as a Goethe, a classical virtuoso whose integrity is so resolved and worldly as to achieve the monumental in the miniature, & whose sense of humor outweighs his already prescient sense of human nature. Only a Goethe could make from a circumstantial plot a work of incidental mastery; only a Chaplin could siphon the juice of humor & sapience from a few scenes of extraordinary levity.
...
It is worthwhile to return to Walter Benjamin for a fitting summation of Chaplin's aesthetic meaning (as an artist reaching final maturity). After watching The Circus, which he demarcates as the 1st to signal Chaplin's late period, Benjamin reports:

The Circus is the first product of the art of film that is also the product of old age. Charlie has grown older since his last film. But he also acts old. And the most moving thing about this new film is the feeling that Chaplin now has a clear overview of his possibilities and is resolved to work exclusively within these limits to attain his goal. At every point the variations on his greatest themes are displayed in their full glory. The chase is set in a maze; his unexpected appearance would astonish a magician; the mask of noninvolvement turns him into a fairground marionette...

One can also repeat with Benjamin, after watching Monsieur Verdoux, that ol' Charlie has indeed gone gray, that his actions are elderly and his humor aged to sweetness. Yet these limits he has placed upon himself are exactly the type of laborious possibilities that the pastmaster seeks to make lithe the earnest act: the 'chase in the maze', the 'unexpected appearance', and the masterly 'mask of noninvolvement' that marks in Chaplin his stoic eminence. M. Verdoux is ultimately a film about Chaplin discovering the grace & natural redemption that old age brings upon the painfully absurd man, even if it should bring him unto death.
...