I got into the work of the great Charlie Chaplin when I went through the AFI film list in 2018. I was a wee bit baffled by one thing though. The version of The Gold Rush that I saw was a 40s reissue narrated by Chaplin himself, and the man had a good, strong voice. Why didn’t he make more talkies? I found out shortly thereafter that Chaplin left the States over a political dispute and that more or less explained everything.
However, he did make one talking picture for Hollywood, and it was his biggest financial success. That would be The Great Dictator, a movie where Chaplin played the duel roles of a Hitler-like dictator and a nameless Jewish barber who happened to look just like said dictator. Political satire wasn’t exactly what Chaplin was known for, but I found the movie on Hulu and here we are.
Honestly, one of the things I loved about Chaplin’s silent features was the man’s talented mime work and physical comedy. And, it turns out, much of The Great Dictator uses that as well. Opening with trench warfare during the first world war, we follow the character eventually revealed to be the barber as he stumbles around the battlefield, loses hand grenades down his uniform sleeves after pulling the pill, and eventually somehow saves a pilot’s life before suffering a head injury that has him thinking, decades later, that no time has passed at all. He knows nothing about how dictator Adenoid Hynkel has taken over his home nation of Tomainia and made life very difficult for the Jews living there. Hynkel’s stormtroopers wander the streets, painting “JEW”on Jewish shop windows, assaulting people, and basically doing what they can to make the lives of the Jews miserable. And into all that, the barber returns.
I must say, I was pleasantly surprised no one really noticed how much the barber and Hynkel looked alike until the end of the movie when the barber takes Hynkel’s place and gives the great pro-democracy and human rights speech directly to the camera. Hynkel’s speeches were all German-sounding gibberish though his conversations with others were in perfectly understandable English. But that final plea, coming out as it did well before the United States entered the war, is clearly more from Chaplin than the barber. As writer, director, and star, Chaplin could do that, and given his focus is straight ahead, pulling in tight as he speaks in what starts as a soft plea and becomes a loud demand, yeah, this is the point of the movie.
That said, this isn’t some kind of dour piece of depressing work. Like the silent Chaplin movies I’ve seen, the plot seems mostly to exist to allow Chaplin to set up various comedic set pieces whether it’s the barber using various weapons in the opening scene’s war or Hynkel making demands and trying to look more important next to a Mussolini parody dictator played by Jack Oakie. Much of the comedy, aside from Hynkel’s speeches, would probably have worked out fine in a silent flick, particularly how Paulette Goddard, Chaplin’s wife at the time, seems to be especially talented with a frying pan to the noggin.
Chaplin is on-record for saying he never would have made the movie if he knew exactly how bad the Jews under Nazi control had it. And while it is true that nothing that happens to the barber or his friends in the Jewish ghetto is nearly as bad as what actually happened in the death camps, there is a certain amount of bravery on display here for Chaplin to even make a movie like this. There were still plenty of Nazi sympathizers in the United States, visibly, before Pearl Harbor dragged the country into the war, and while the movie may not have gone over well with the Germans, Americans weren’t necessarily chomping at the bit to take them on again in 1940. As such, Chaplin showed a great deal of artistic bravery when he made this, and fortunately, he made a good movie to boot.
Grade: A
0 Comments