Monsieur Verdoux

Chaplin's self-styled 'comedy of murders' (from an idea by Orson Welles) about a gent who marries short-lived wealthy women was generally disliked on its first appearance: people found it slow, cold, bitter and insufficiently funny. Now it shapes up as Chaplin's most startling, most invigorating movie: its icy temperature is positively bracing after the hot syrup of his earlier work (though a dollop of that survives in the waif character played by Marilyn Nash). Chaplin uses his customary fastidious gestures to emphasis human nastiness - typified by the brassy Martha Raye, who plays the most vulgar woman ever created, chattering away with her mouth full of croissant and laughing not like one drain but ten.