Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin plays anything but a tramp in "Monsieur Verdoux." The story (the idea for which is credited to Orson Welles) involves a French bank clerk who, after being laid off at the onset of the Great Depression, murders an array of old dames that he courts in order for his beloved family to live in modest comfort. While we may not spend much time with his wife and son, the implication that they are a happy, normal family--an enlightened one, perhaps, as they are vegetarians (couldn't have been too common in nineteen-thirties France)--is clear.

Verdoux can kill because he's an incredible cynic, or, rather, he's become one after having watched the world dissolve around him; his pragmatism, after all, is forged out of a traditionalist's notion of love. One almost wants to see a bit more tenderness--when his family dies off-screen, Chaplin misses an extraordinary opportunity to exhibit what must have been a crucial moment for his character--but one also appreciates the black comedy and the snippets of slapstick that Chaplin was still able to pull off (he was 58 at the time).

There's a wild farcicality in the tone; but the wry deadpan of our proto-Hannibal Lecter hero never undercuts the notion that murder is bad. The ambiguity is rich and textured and doesn't really go overboard because of its slick Old Hollywood shell. The movie is flawed--Chaplin gets a little too preachy at the end and his rendering of France is not particularly believable--but "Monsieur Verdoux" hasn't lost its edge.

The Warriors

Walter Hill says his cult classic "The Warriors" is about courage, but it certainly isn't about heroism. In retrospect, the Warriors themselves are hardly distinguishable from one another except that the one that's arrested is lewd and the one who proclaims himself leader is (almost parodistically) as plain as toast, the butter being his stagnant, pretty boy hairdo. They aren't really heroes in either the Greek sense or the comic book sense; they, like the rest of the gangs that they mingle with in the course of this unforgiving night, just want to survive and maintain a grip on their turf. Their blandness or fungibility may actually be key; the movie is not about them, it's about what happens to them--or, rather, how it happens to them.

Hill's not-too-distant future isn't a product of pessimism like Kubrick's ("A Clockwork Orange") or Ridley Scott's ("Blade Runner"); in fact it's the product of no foresight or pretense to such at all. It's more of a fantasy for kids who were becoming nauseated by disco and starting to turn to punk and I think the proto-punk nihilism is what continues to be appealing to young people today, twenty-eight years after the movie's release. It's not as affectless as it seems, because, as it is for so many teens, the nihilism here is just a cover for a small-minded, but universal, code of honor. The movie kind of ridicules the traditional notion of the hero wanting more out of life than his petty brushes with gangsters, but, in a quiet way, it doesn't. It knows that the kids in the audience wouldn't have admitted to enjoying that, so it gave the hormone-inflicted pre-emo audience what it consciously demanded: rock, sex and fighting. The flick is cut expertly to the jock-rock (provided mostly by Joe Walsh) and slummy late-seventies New York looks demonic in seedy, after-hours neon and fluorescent lighting that looks like "American Graffiti" growing up into "Pulp Fiction." It's the New York of "Taxi Driver," but chillier, emptier, more industrial and less fleshy. It's corrupt in a more juvenile way. Only the imaginatively-themed gangs and the coppers in pursuit are out at this late hour--which is, consciously, well past the teenie bopper audience's bedtime--and anybody else on the scene (like two yuppie couples coming home from a disco) is made to know that they do not belong.

To me, "The Warriors" is power-pop kitsch equal to other movies overly-evocative of their eras such as "Rebel Without a Cause," "Easy Rider," "Saturday Night Fever" and "Scarface." It's fun in a silly, absurd, goofball kind of way, but it's not altogether witless. When David Patrick Kelly famously jeers, "War-riors, come out and play-ay," you know that he knows the coke-headed absurdity of it all.

Robocop

"Robocop" is Paul Verhoeven's nice little satire of corporatization. It's witty and affably small for a movie of its type, but it's also very thin. The Detroit slum villains (who are, notably, forty-year-old white men) are lusciously sadistic like the comic book bad guys they are supposedly meant to reflect, but the heroes (when stripped of their metal chasis) aren't particularly interesting. Peter Weller is a good, straight-man satirist when his vocoder is in place, but his partner in the police force, played by Nancy Allen, has the faintness of a plot device. Some of the framework of the plot is likewise shoddy, but it's mostly swept underneath the carpet of clever direction and fluky action sequences. The vaguely overcast cyberpunk atmosphere is gloomy, but it's a tasty little action confection that's very easy to swallow.