(Charles Chaplin, US 1947, 123 min.)

Leaving the Little Tramp behind, Chaplin plays a soft-spoken French gentleman who supports his children and crippled wife by marrying rich widows and killing them. Chaplin’s theme — that if war is the logical extension of diplomacy, then murder is the logical extension of business — is delivered in a series of darkly hilarious and elegantly staged comic sequences, culminating in another of the director’s movingly poignant conclusions.