Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
It is top tier Chaplin. It's Chaplin at his most angry. The story of an unemployed who earns his living by seducing then killing older lonely women and then disappearing with their money, based on the true story of a French criminal.
Alike Ealing comedies from the same period (Ladykillers, Kind hearts and Coronets) or Hitchcock's The trouble with Harry, it understands perfectly the connexion between suspense and comedy. By showing the audience things that the characters ignore, or showing converstations where one character knows something that the other one doesn't, you can create both suspense and comedy: both rely on the same storytelling approach that Chaplin fully embraces, with his usual perfect direction and sense of rythm. Each scene is incredibly suspenseful, and while some end in murder, other end in comedy. The set-up is the same, only the issue differ.
But on the contrary of the Ealing comedies, where the film shocks by its total lack of morality, creating a world where moral compass is only the bottom of the joke, Chaplin while having an immoral lead still makes a moral film. Verdoux knows right and wrong, a notion the heroes of Kind hearts of coronets seem to fully ignore. Destroyed by a broken capitalist society, Verdoux has renounced rightfulness, but he tries to somehow reach for some mercy.
Chaplin ends by comparing his criminal with other criminals and inserts images of Hitler or Mussolini, he also shows bankers comitting suicide at the peak of the financial crisis. He compares the few women Verdoux killed to the millions that died because of how gorrible society is. Never has Chaplin been so upfront with his disgust for the society of his time. Probably way too much for his own good, at a time where he was already accused of being a communist.
And while some could consider that Chaplin refuses to condemn Verdoux and his murder by comparing him to Hitler, Mussolini... he more accurately wonders how society can still be legitimate to condemn people and how society can regain its moral sense.
Tavernier will have a same approach at the end of Le juge et l'assassin, where he ends by comparing the numbers of people his pedophile lead character killed and the number of kids who died working the mines every year during the last decade of the nineteenth century, while the character start singing a socialist anthem. Both films finally expressing wothout constraints their anger towards a society only strong against the weakest.