Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/790371
16 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2017 THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY charges, the paternity trial jury in 1945 voted 11 to 1 against Chaplin and ordered him to pay child support. With the war drawing to a close, public opinion was also influenced by the growing political censure of the comedian's speaking at wartime rallies in support of the US' Soviet allies against Nazi Germany. Through it all, the filmmaker continued work on Verdoux. He completed the script in February 1946 and sent it immediately to Joseph Breen of the Production Code Administration (PCA) for approval. After a series of letters and a meeting with Breen over the PCA's detailed objections to dialogue about illicit sex, the mocking of religion and the equating of war with murder, Chaplin agreed to a seven-page list of minor changes (like changing "come to bed" to "get to bed"). Pre-production had already begun at the Chaplin Studios, which the moviemaker had built for himself in 1917 (now the Jim Henson Company Lot), with the producer/director/writer/star/composer virtually micro-managing the entire project. The film's director of photography, Roland Totheroh, ASC, had begun his career shooting Western shorts before working with Chaplin in 1915, and then almost exclusively for the next 32 years. Budgeted for $1.5 million, the shoot was scheduled for 61 days, almost entirely at the studio, shooting six days a week from May 31 to August 13, 1946. Production went 19 days over schedule, finishing on September 5 with the budget approaching $2 million. There were no retakes, but additional shots and inserts were done by a second unit through March 4, 1947. Cast and crew were sworn to secrecy about the production until its release. Verdoux's complex character and his subtle shifts from hard businessman to loving family man required that Chaplin cast an actor opposite him to draw the film's broadest laughs. For the role of Annabella Bonheur, the wife who unwittingly evades all his efforts to kill her, he chose "The Big Mouth" comic, Martha Raye. Raised performing in vaudeville with her parents, Raye started making movies in 1936. When her agent told her that Chaplin wanted to give her second billing in his next picture, she thought it was a joke: "To a comedienne, that's like God calling you." For the movie's takeoff on Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925), three days in August were spent on Lake Malibu shooting Verdoux's attempt to murder Anabella in a rowboat. In contrast, the climactic courtroom scene was shot in one day; Chaplin performed his speech 10 times and printed six takes for editing. On September 9, he began cutting with editor Willard Nico, who had worked with him on his three previous features — City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and Dictator. Starting in November, the filmmaker composed the music with arranger Rudolph Schrager. On March 4, 1947, with a shooting ratio of about 28:1, the finished film ran two hours and four minutes. The moviemaker screened Verdoux on March 10 privately for friends, including writers Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, who had fled Germany when Hitler came to power. Chaplin wrote that they "and several others stood up and applauded for over a minute." The next day, he showed the movie to the PCA Monsieur Verdoux. Charles Chaplin/Photofest