The Great Dictator (1940) straddles absurdity and warning. The monologue Chaplin delivers at the end is shockingly timely today, and yet it was meant for a previous generation who fought fascism with humor, and then drama, and then, when that wasn’t enough, with armies.
Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” persona had been officially retired in his previous film, Modern Times (1936), which we covered here. Yet the hapless misfit, here known only as a Jewish Barber, retains the Tramp’s innocence, athletic clumsiness, and knack for getting in and out of trouble. But here he also has a doppelganger, in the form of a dictator who sends his goon squads to threaten Jews, as he plans for war on a neighboring country. Despite the childishly pompous dictator’s fiendish actions, he is himself a buffoon, a joke, and something to be laughed at for his ineptitude. We do not really fear him…but we do have a sense of fear over his cult following, who carry out his every whim.
It was a daring film, not only to mock a figure who was clearly meant to represent Hitler during a time when we were not yet at war, but to draw attention to the fact that the Jews were so named as his scapegoats and his first victims. Other films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, even those that boldly decried fascism at home and abroad, shied away from explicitly pointing out that Jews were being treated badly. It was a courageous and utterly decent move by Chaplin, but he wrote in his 1964 My Autobiography (NY: Simon & Schuster, p. 392),
Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.For all its boldness in showing ruffian soldiers painting “JEW” on a shop window, the movie has more than its share of silliness.
Some scenes, such as the dueling barber chairs between the dictator and his adversary dictator played by Jack Oakie, clearly meant to be Mussolini, seem right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Mel Brooks-style Springtime for Hitler-type gags that mock the arrogance of the fascists, and the dictator's frantic speech delivered to his adoring throngs in a kind of pidgin-German reminds one of the fast and furious faux German speech of Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. They were the imitators; Chaplin was the original.
There are two serious characters, though, on either side. Henry Daniell plays an advisor to Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator. Daniell is sinister, quiet and utterly serious. He seems far more dangerous than the dictator, if only because he is more intelligent, more self-disciplined, and sociopathic. Compared to him, the dictator seems like a clown.
The other serious character is played by Maurice Moscovitch as Mr. Jaeckel, an elderly leader in the Jewish ghetto who helps the Jewish Barber and his community in any way he can. We see his concern and his resolve, but he is actually helpless against the onslaught of oppression.
Billy Gilbert has a comic role as a bumbling staff member of the dictator, and we note the silly names further poke fun at the bad guys. Gilbert is “Herring,” possibly a shortening of Hermann Göring, and the evil Henry Daniell plays “Garbitsch,” (garbage).
Two people who have the biggest impact on the Jewish Barber are Reginald Gardiner, who plays an officer in World War I who was saved by the barber and later repays the debt by saving him from the dictator; and Paulette Goddard as Hannah, a waif of the ghetto.
Miss Goddard was married to Chaplin at the time, and serves as his innocent love interest. Though this movie does not really have the Chaplin trademark pathos of many of his comedies, what there is can be discerned through the scrappy Paulette Goddard, orphaned and supporting herself doing housework and laundry, and facing the bullying soldiers.
The movie begins in the later days of World War I where Chaplin as the Jewish Barber is part of a German (or Tomanian, as the country is called Tomania) artillery. Though the setting with its trenches and bombed-out landscape of leafless trees is bleak, there is a jolt of silliness in how he maneuvers the Big Bertha howitzer, and how he loses a live hand grenade up his sleeve.
He comes upon Reginald Gardiner, a downed flyer who is desperately trying to escape in his plane from the advancing enemy, and Chaplin helps him, with more gags about flying upside-down. Though the plane crashes, they survive and we have the end of the war in blaring headlines, movie fashion.
The Jewish Barber spends many years in the hospital due to
his injuries from the crash, and has amnesia.
He does not realize a decade has passed when he leaves the hospital; he
thinks it has been only a matter of weeks, and like Rip Van Winkle, he returns
to find his village utterly changed. His
barber shop is now part of the ghetto, and “JEW” is written across the
shutters.
But he seems oblivious to the change at first, or at least does not realize the significance of what is happening around him. Soon, he ends up the prey of a troop of soldiers, who put a noose around his neck and try to hang him from a lamp post. Suddenly, Reginald Gardiner intervenes, remembers his old friend, and saves his life. Since he is an officer, he gives orders to the soldiers to leave Chaplin and the Jews alone.
Meanwhile, the dictator is still spewing his ridiculous
orders, and it seems silly when he and Henry Daniell, wanting to preserve Aryan
purity, which means getting rid of dark-haired and dark-eyed people as much as
Jews, remark, “We’ll get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the
brunettes!”
Planning world domination, we then have the memorable scene of the dictator considering a large globe in his office, which is actually a balloon, and he tosses it, dances a dreamlike ballet with it. But at last, it pops in his arms.
Back to the Jewish Barber, who no less silly, shaves a man
to the frenetic strains of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5.
The dictator wants a loan from a banker named Epstein, whom we do not see, but is denied, and therefore he will send his troops to march on a country named Osterlich (Austria). First, he meets with his counterpart dictator, Napaloni, played by Jack Oakie, and they try to top each other in self-importance.
The barber and Paulette Goddard are thrown together in the ghetto by circumstances and through the matchmaking efforts of Mr. Muscovitch, who advises the barber to open a beauty shop for women and insists he practice on Goddard. At first, absentmindedly attempting to shave her as he would a male customer, the barber instead washes and coifs her hair, making the Cinderella of the ashes beautiful.
But life gets suddenly grim again when Reginald Gardiner
refuses to attack Jews and has lost favor in the high command. Though he heroically joins their resistance,
he cannot protect them anymore. He and the
barber are captured and sent to a concentration camp.
When they make their escape in stolen officers’ clothing, we finally get to the point we knew was coming all along—the Prince and the Pauper switching of the identical barber and the dictator. (Chaplin’s famous character with his dark toothbrush mustache so resembled Hitler that people referring to Hitler on the sly sometimes called him The Little Tramp, to avoid saying his surname.) The barber and Reginald Gardiner are whisked to an enormous outdoor stadium, Nuremberg-like, to make a speech of conquest.
The jokes end here, as the barber, looking sickened in his
seat, awkwardly steps up to the stage (how ironic that the word “liberty” is solidly
in stone there) and the radio microphones, and the vast sea of willing cult
members in uniform leaning on his every word.
He gives the famous speech that resonates with us
today. That it does resonate would not
make Chaplin proud of his work, but would leave him, as it leaves us, dazed,
depressed, and heartsick. And angry.
The movie concludes with a close-up on Paulette Goddard, who listens to the speech on the radio. It is a hopeful and inspiring ending. But it is not true. It would take several years of war to stop the madness, because when a people wait too long, madness can only be stopped by force.
It is important to face bleak facts and fight evil in any
way possible, even to give one’s life to do so, but it is also important to realize
that the evildoers are not invincible.
They can be taken down with the rule of law. Laughing at them also helps. They hate that.
Watch the speech here below.
The entire movie can currently be found on YouTube.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
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