Yesterday (March 24) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “31 Days of Oscar” showing of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire The Great Dictator. It was Chaplin’s first all-talkie (his immediately preceding film, 1936’s Modern Times – a stunning masterpiece and my personal favorite Chaplin film – had contained a few sequences of voices heard commanding factory workers over intercoms and a final song-and-dance routine by Chaplin, but was otherwise still silent), and it was a film built around Chaplin’s striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler. Chaplin, who as usual wrote, produced, directed and starred in the film, used the Rip Van Winkle gimmick of a Jewish barber who fights for his native country, Tomania, during World War I. He and Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) are involved in a plane crash, and Schulktz fully recovers but Chaplin’s character ends up in a military hospital for 20 years, unaware of the cataclysmic changes in the world since then: the Armistice, the peace treaty, the Depression and the ascendancy of “Adenoid Hynkel, the Fuhi of Tomania” to power. He comes into conflict with the New Order almost immediately when he sees a storm trooper vandalizing the outside of his barbershop with the word “JEW” and starts to wipe it off.
Chaplin builds his film by cutting back and forth between himself as the barber (who still has some of the characteristics of the “Little Tramp,” including the bowler hat, the rattan cane and the jacket a size too small for him) and himself as “Hynkel,” whom he portrays as the ethnic stereotype of the comic German. His two big pantomime sequences occur right after each other, as “Hynkel” does an elaborate dance with a balloon globe as he fantasizes being dictator of the world and the soundtrack plays the prelude to act I of Wagner’s Lohengrin; and Chaplin as the barber shaving his old Keystone colleague Chester Conklin to a radio broadcast of Brahms’ most famous Hungarian dance. (I can’t help but think Chaplin was deliberately referencing the Wagner-vs.-Brahms rivalry that gripped the German music scene in the late 19th century as well as Hitler’s well-known love of Wagner in this juxtaposition – Wagner as the composer for the bad people and Brahms as the composer for the good people – except that at the end of the film he reprises the Lohengrin prelude with his final shot of Paulette Goddard as Hannah defying the storm troopers and standing triumphant.)
The Great Dictator is a remarkable movie which apparently was controversial when it was made – Chaplin, who had never naturalized as an American citizen (and when asked why not during the McCarthy era he gave a very politically incorrect reply: “I consider myself a citizen of the entire world; I owe no allegiance to any particular country”) and was still a subject of the British crown, was accused of making an anti-Hitler movie as propaganda to get the U.S. to enter World War II on the British side. Though The Great Dictator was a commercial success on its initial release, the political attack on it started the unraveling of Chaplin’s standing as a major movie star and ultimately his expulsion from the U.S. in 1953. My mother told me an interesting story about seeing The Great Dictator on its initial release, when she was a 12-year-old Jewish girl in the U.S. Until then, instead of fearing a fictitious “boogeyman” taking her in the middle of the night and killing her, she was afraid of a very real boogeyman, Adolf Hitler. Then she saw The Great Dictator and suddenly she was no longer afraid of Hitler personally; he was just someone she could laugh at. In Chaplin’s 1965 autobiography he said he could not have made The Great Dictator if he’d known about the Holocaust – though in fact the Holocaust was not yet happening when Chaplin shot the film. The Nazis were certainly persecuting the Jews, but it wasn’t until the Wannsee conference of January 1942 (which Hitler authorized but did not attend personally) that the Nazis decided to kill them all. And in Garson Kanin’s autobiography Hollywood he recalled asking Chaplin why, when he played his parody Hitler, he kept his hair tousled on top of his head and didn’t comb it over his forehead the way the real Hitler did, “Why should I?” Chaplin replied, “I was using this makeup before he was!”
I’ve loved The Great Dictator since I first saw it in 1974 at a revival theatre in Berkeley, and I’ve come to accept and enjoy even aspects of the film that bothered me back then, like the portrayal of the storm troopers as Keystone Kops and the big final speech at the end, in which Chaplin as the Jewish barber is forced to impersonate “Hynkel” at the big rally celebrating Tomania’s conquest of neighboring “Austerlitz.” His final speech – shot straight ahed with Chaplin declaiming to the camera (Chaplin came to sound films a decade late and want through all the growing pains the rest of the industry had in the late 1920’s) – begins in a quiet, soft-spoken manner but soon rises in energy and volume to become a full-fledged Hitler-style tirade, albeit on the opposite political and ideological direction. I’ve long thought Chaplin had seen the power of Hither’s oratory and rhetoric and wanted to see if he could harness it for exactly the opposite purpose – a call for peace and democracy instead of war and authoritarianism – creating himslef as a “good Hitler” in opposition to the real-life bad Hitler.
The Great Dictator is also an unusually strongly cast Chaplin film,with Henry Daniell marvelous as “Garbitsch,” the great dictator’s propaganda minister (his performance seems like a warmup for his star turn as Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green five years later); Billy Gilbert for once making his years playing stereotypical comic Germans pay off as “Herring,” minister of war; and Jack Oakie great in an OIscar-nominated performance as “Benzino Napaloni, Il Diggaditchi of Bacteria.” It’s a film that holds up surprisingly well, especially in the modern era in which once again wana-be authoritarians are parading before electorates in various countries pleading for votes so they can come to power and destroy democracy once and for all. When I wrote about Dunald Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2916 Republican Convention. I invoked comparisons to this film, saying that Trump was presenting himself as Adolf Hitler but – especially in his queeny hand gestores whenever he wanted his audience to stop applauding so he could continue his speech – he reminded me even more of Chaplin’s “Adenoid Hynkel.”
