He is sentenced to death in a murder trial, but compares his relatively few victims to the millions of people killed in wars waged for profit.

As Verdoux (Chaplin) prepares to sell Thelma Couvais's home, the widowed Marie Grosnay (Isobel Elsom) visits.

The chemist explains the formula and that he had to stop working on it after the local pharmaceutical board banned it, so Verdoux attempts to recreate the drug.

When he finds she was just released from prison and has nowhere to go, he prepares dinner for her with wine laced with his newly developed poison.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, European markets collapse, with the subsequent bank failures causing Verdoux to go bankrupt.

A few years later, in 1937, with the Spanish Civil War underway, The Girl, now well-dressed and chic, once again finds Verdoux on a street corner in Paris.

When he is sentenced in the courtroom, rather than expressing remorse he takes the opportunity to say that the world encourages mass killers, and that compared to the makers of modern weapons he is but an amateur.

He says "I've never tasted rum", downs the glass, and the priest begins reciting a prayer in Latin as the guards lead him away and the film ends.

Welles claimed that he was developing a film of his own and was inspired to cast Chaplin as a character based on Landru.

Chaplin was initially interested, as it would provide him with an opportunity for a more dramatic role, as well as saving him the trouble of having to write the film himself.

While immediately after the end of World War II there appeared on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean a spate of films, including in 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives, It's a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death, which drew on so many people's experience of loss of loved ones and offered a kind of consolation,[5] Monsieur Verdoux had an unapologetically dark tone, featuring as its protagonist a murderer who feels justified in committing his crimes.

Moreover, Chaplin's popularity and public image had been irrevocably damaged by many scandals and political controversies before its release.

[7] Chaplin was subjected to unusually hostile treatment by the press while promoting the opening of the film, and some boycotts took place during its short run.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said the film was "tediously slow" in many stretches but said that Chaplin's "performance is remarkably adroit and that those who assist him, especially Miss Raye, are completely up to snuff.

"[7] In New Jersey, the film was picketed by members of the Catholic War Veterans, who carried placards calling for Chaplin to be deported.

[10] Richard Coe in The Washington Post lauded Monsieur Verdoux, calling it "a bold, brilliant and bitterly amusing film".

[11] James Agee praised the film as well, calling it "a great poem" and "one of the few indispensable works of our time".