The Great Dictator (1940)

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.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

Modern Times (1936)

Modern Times (1936) says goodbye to The Little Tramp and hello to a brave new world. Charlie Chaplin takes aim at the horrors of industrialism and the tribulations of the Great Depression, and yet he brings along a nostalgic zest for the earlier twentieth century that is not going gently into that good night.  Inevitably, he presents us with a Valentine.

Continuing our look this year at films from the 1930s that make a social commentary on that decade, as I’ve mentioned before, many filmmakers in this era chose to deliberately comment on social conditions in that challenging time and make “modern times” the backdrop of even silly comedies.  You didn’t have to look far to see a message.   We turn now to a giant (a little giant maybe, but still a giant) in the history of film who does just this, and uses it to give his most famous and beloved character not just a curtain call, but a socially relevant one.

Mr. Chaplin came to realize that The Little Tramp’s era of particular innocence was over, and practically speaking, there was no way to continue his adventures not speaking.  Therefore, this is the last “silent film” made featuring our hapless hero.  However, it is also the first film we hear Chaplin’s voice—later in the movie when he sings a silly song.

The film is mostly silent, with some sound effects and very little dialogue—mostly from the boss of the factory who bellows at his employees via a large television-type screen.  This is not your father’s industrial revolution; in fact, the factory where Chaplin works is almost Buck Rogers futuristic, an Art Deco version of a factory.  It is the 1930s, after all.

The movie starts with a stark title screen and a rather film noir-ish musical theme, threatening and foreboding.   We see the image of a flock of sheep, and then the image of men climbing subway steps in a herd, running to the factory, to suggest that they are sheep.  The title card tells us this is “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

Will humanity succeed in finding happiness?  Maybe only at times.

It doesn’t start well for The Little Tramp and quickly goes downhill from there.  We see him tightening nuts on an assembly line, having trouble keeping up.  The bellowing owner from his omniscient screen observes them and wants more speed.  He is played by Al Ernest Garcia.

Charlie takes a smoke break in the washroom, but he gets yelled at by the face on the screen even in there.  Big Brother is even in the bathroom.

Efficiency experts come to the factory to demonstrate a new machine that will make the workers eat lunch faster—and poor Charlie is chosen to demonstrate.  Strapped into a chair, a revolving, demonic lazy Susan is placed before him, and he is force-fed soup, corn on the cob, and gets the traditional slapstick pie in the face from a mechanical arm, while his face is blotted intermittently with a large office blotter.  It’s a funny skit, and levity helps us—if not Charlie—from going crazy at the imprisonment of his workplace. 

When Charlie is on a break or off the line, he continues to twitch with the motion of tightening nuts with two large wrenches.  Poor Charlie goes berserk from the stress, ends up being threaded through the giant cogs of a machine in the iconic scene.  Afterwards, he takes his large wrenches and attempts to tighten anything—including the large dress buttons strategically placed on the breasts of a passing woman.  This is one of those gags that’s more funny if we are led right up to the moment and then is suddenly cut off, because what we imagine could happen is always funnier.

Playfully and maniacally out of control, Charlie is chased by his co-workers, taken to a hospital, and later, cured of a nervous breakdown, and must start his life over.

He is constantly starting over from square one in this movie, and that, too, is a comment on the modern condition.  We must be prepared to start over.  Always.

In another funny mistake, he falls into a manhole and comes up with a red warning flag, such that construction workers would take on a job, and when he emerges from the manhole with the flag, just at that moment, a protest march by a communist workers’ group is going by and he gets swept up with them.  He is rounded up and taken to the police station. 

Meanwhile, Paulette Goddard plays a poor girl living in a shack by the waterfront with her widowed father and two kid sisters. She is The Gamin. Dad is out of work, heavily burdened by the Depression, and Paulette, with a scrappy survivor’s instinct, steals bananas to feed the family.  Reportedly, one of her little sisters was played by Gloria DeHaven at 10 or 11 years old in her first role.

Charlie is sent to prison, and when cocaine is smuggled to another prisoner via a salt shaker, referred to on our helpful title card as “nose powder,” Charlie inadvertently douses his food with it.  His wide-eyed reaction tells us he is high.  One wonders how that got by the Production Code.  Helpless to control himself, he accidentally foils a plot by revolting prisoners to overtake the guards, and he is rewarded with release.  He doesn’t really want to leave, though.  He is cozy in his cell, with no responsibilities and three squares a day.  It’s a good setup for a guy like Charlie, who loses every job he gets.  When he is freed, he is told, “Now make good.”

The Gamin, meanwhile, gets into trouble when her poor father is shot to death.  The authorities step in and take the two younger girls, but Paulette escapes.  She finally crosses paths with Charlie when he gets fired from a shipbuilding company on the waterfront where she lives, and he accidentally launches a half-built ship. She has stolen bread and runs smack into him.  Gentleman that he is, and out of work besides, he allows himself to be arrested and carted off to the hoosegow once again.  He offers his seat to Paulette in the police van and helps her to escape.  Even eating a big meal in a restaurant without the money to pay for it won’t keep him in jail for long, but when he meets Paulette, Charlie decides it’s better to stay out of jail, and he vows he will get a home for them both, “even if I have to work for it.”

They are two lost souls battling the storms of life, but The Little Tramp is a man-child, and their relationship is as playful as brother and sister.

He takes a job as a night watchman in a department store.  Again, as we’ve seen in this previous post on Employees' Entrance (1933), the multi-story downtown department store has a special place in the Great Depression.  It is the cathedral of commerce, with the promise of good times coming again, despite most people not having enough money to do more than window-shop.

Charlie provides a place for Paulette to sleep on home furnishings floor, and while she luxuriates in a comfortable floor model bed, he runs into a former co-worker from the factory that has now been shut down.  He is Big Bill, played by Stanley “Tiny” Sandford, and he is going to rob the store.  One of his accomplices explains, “We ain’t burglars—we’re hungry.”  

It ends, of course, with Charlie taken off to jail again, but before that we have that stunning scene where he tries out roller skates and nearly plumets to his death on a floor where renovation construction is not finished and he comes very close to falling several stories while cutting a caper with fancy skating moves.  Classic film fans may know this is just a very clever matte shot, and Chaplin was not in danger doing the stunt, but it looks terrific.

When Charlie is released from jail this time, Paulette faithfully waits for him, and provides a tumbledown shack for their home, and she has returned to stealing food. 

The factory where he worked at the beginning of the movie is reopening and he hopes to get a real home for them.  He is assigned as an assistant to a mechanic, played by Chester Conklin.  This time, Chester gets caught in the cogs and Charlie’s not much help.  Paulette, Charlie, and Chester would all reunite in The Great Dictator (1940).

Believe it or not, he has another stay in jail, while Paulette gets a job as a dancer in a café, and she gets him a job as a singing waiter there when he’s out of the lockup.  Here’s where we get to finally hear Charlie Chaplin’s voice.  He cannot remember the words to the song he’s supposed to sing, so he makes up gibberish and we see him dashing about the dancefloor, twisting himself into a frenetic ballet, and singing a song Chaplin wrote called, “Je cherche après titine,” which is a mixture of French and Italian that he roguishly performs as a supposedly risqué song. Have a look here.

But wouldn’t you know, life comes down hard again, and the authorities who have been looking for Paulette all this time have returned.  She and Charlie escape, but scrappy Paulette has finally run out of courage.  They stand on the dusty open road that stretches out miles ahead of them.  Is it promising, or is it bleak?  Perhaps it’s just a matter of viewpoint.

“What’s the use of trying?” she says in tears.

He answers, “Buck up—never say die.  We’ll get along!”  It is the theme of the Great Depression for those who survived it.  I can remember many years ago watching a documentary series on the Great Depression with my father, who was a teenager during those years, and who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help send money back to support his widowed mother and kid sisters.  At the time, it was an adventure.  Bad times were shrugged off because if they weren’t, you were done for just by giving up.  But as an old man, looking back, with perhaps less courage than he had when he was a teen, and having acquired a great deal more knowledge about life in the meantime, he muttered, stony-faced at the TV:  “My God, it’s a wonder we ever survived it.”

In the background, while Charlie is comforting Paulette, we hear the music he wrote, which would later gain lyrics and the title “Smile.”  The first to record it supposedly was Nat King Cole, many years later.  You can listen to it here.

There was no single anthem of that generation, but this quiet, hopeful song may have been one of them.

It was a perfect way, as Charlie and Paulette gather their things and walk down the road together to meet head-on whatever happens next, for The Little Tramp to leave us.  I like to think he’s still down the road somewhere, shrugging off mishaps.

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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.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

 

 

 

 

So Proudly We Hail (1943)

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S., when we commemorate members of the American armed forces who have lost their lives in war. Among the many films which would aptly illustrate the experiences of the armed forces in various conflicts, one film seems particularly poignant in its ability to reach audiences today. Perhaps because parts of the film are so eerily prescient of our modern struggle with its ironic lack of national purpose and idealism. This is “So Proudly We Hail!” (1943), the story of the Army Nurse Corps experiences on Bataan and Corregidor during World War II.

There is much to recommend this film: some fine dramatic performances from Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake, an excellent supporting cast and very fine special effects in the battle scenes. The story moves swiftly along and we are caught up in many subplots that inevitably take a back seat to the war itself. What is especially interesting is the script. Written by Allan Scott, who had teamed with this film’s director Mark Sandrich, on so much lighter fare in the 1930s, such as several Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicles, Scott’s script is surprisingly lean and muscular. There are several bits of dialogue, soliloquies we should actually call them, which illustrate the feelings of the characters regarding their place in the war. These speeches are labeled today as the stuff of propaganda, but they are clear, clean, well-written, and deserve special notice today.

On the ship that takes the Army nurses to the Philippines in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the chaplain, played by Walter Abel, addresses the Christmas Eve party of officers and enlisted men: “This is the night before Christmas, and because it is, you must forgive me for being sentimental. We are a sentimental people. And I think we’re proud of it. Despite the fact that our enemies deride us for it, it makes us the stronger.”

The chaplain exhorts them to have, “Such faith in mankind that we are tough about the things we believe in, that we will make those tender and spiritual beliefs, like Christmas, a reality forever.” There are close-up shots of the young men with serious faces listening to him. Then from somewhere a swing version of “Jingle Bells” gets the party going. This, too, like sentimentality, is seen as typically American.

Another speech is given by Colbert after the nurses are stranded on Corregidor, and a nurse wearily complains, “Why are we here anyway?” Colbert responds, “Why? Why isn’t there any quinine? Why isn’t there any food? Why aren’t there any supplies? Why are we waiting here like rats in a cage waiting for the man to come and pour scalding water over us? Why is nothing done? Why? I’ll tell you why. It’s our fault…because we believed we were the world. That the United States of America was the whole world. Those outlandish places, Bataan, Corregidor, Mindanao, those aren’t American names. No. They’re just American graveyards.”

After the initial shock of admitting our own ignorance about the world has left us vulnerable, Miss Colbert’s speech becomes a warning to the stateside audience in the darkened movie theater. One of her nurses wonders why they can’t be removed from Corregidor, and Colbert replies, “They can’t get us off. We’ve become what they call a delaying action…I hope to God the people back home aren’t losing it for us. Do you remember what the chaplain once told us? It’s our present. We’re giving them time.”

These speeches address the past and the present aspects of American military consequences, but their chief nurse, Captain “Ma” McGregor, played by Mary Servoss, mourns her son and addresses the unimaginable future to which these young women, and their country, plod along,

“Like his father, he died for what he knew was right. He was right. My son and his father. And this time, if we don’t make it right, my son and his father and all our dead will rise up and destroy us.” This is reflected more hopefully in George Reeve’s letter to his new wife, Colbert at the end of the film, “This is our war now and this time it’ll be our peace.”

We are less clear today on purpose and ideals, and in a more cynical world, less equipped with the idealism that makes purpose seem clear. There is another image from “So Proudly We Hail!” that lingers, horrifically, in its prescience of 21st century warfare. Veronica Lake becomes a suicide bomber in a scene still shocking today. Her character has witnessed the death of her fiancé at Pearl Harbor, and her barely concealed hostility for the enemy, as well as her fellow nurses and the world in general, is finally broken under the camaraderie of her fellow nurses and the greater cause of fighting the war and keeping themselves, and their patients in the jungle hospital, alive.

When the nurses are trapped by the sudden advance of a Japanese patrol, Lake stuffs a grenade in her uniform blouse, bids a stoic goodbye to Colbert, and loosens her trademark long, wavy blonde hair from its neat military bun. She walks towards the enemy, a mixture of sex and sacrifice, her hair softly cascading over her face and shoulders and she pulls the pin to the grenade nestled hidden beneath her breast. The Japanese approach her to take her into custody, and we are meant to assume she will be raped. Then she explodes, and they are all killed. The nurses escape.

Such a scene has different connotations to us today, and is more distasteful than heroic. It may have an even stronger impact on us today than it did in 1943, for different reasons, just as the impassioned speeches have a lesser impact on us today. When we take this Memorial Day to reflect on the bravery of our fallen service personnel, we should also reflect on the idealism that made them so brave.