Inspired by Bertolt Brecht's adage, "One murder makes a man a villain, millions, a hero," Chaplin created Monsieur Verdoux, "a comedy of murders" criticizing the continued hostilities following the end of World War II. The American public repaid Chaplin's audacity by delivering him his first critical and commercial disaster. Monsieur Verdoux has since come to be widely regarded as one of Chaplin's greatest films. Chaplin plays the dapper Parisian, Henri Verdoux, who solves the problem of Depression unemployment by marrying and then murdering wealthy women. In this singular manner he supports an unsuspecting wife and family. This modern Bluebeard seems a complete turnabout from Chaplin's silent screen persona, but in some ways, he is a logical evolution of the tramp: above all, he is a survivor of hard times, and much of the film's humor lies in the gentleman murderer's efforts to maintain a sense of propriety in the most degrading of circumstances. Monsieur Verdoux is one of Chaplin's most outspoken films; in prison, before his last drink of rum, Verdoux philosophizes on the "business" of killing--from the work of small businessmen like himself to the atomic bomb.