“We Must Put Him In His Place” | The Endless Relevance of The Great Dictator
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I would say that if you are sentient enough to be able to access these words, then you know a key reason as to why we at the Chicago Critics Film Festival have elected to include a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s groundbreaking 1940 comedy classic “The Great Dictator” as part of this year’s lineup.
However, while that may be one of the driving forces behind our selection of this film, it is by no means the only one. We could have included it in our program from 10 years ago to commemorate its 75th anniversary and I dare say that in that bygone period of 2015, it would have been looked upon as nothing more than a tribute to one of the most notable films in the history of cinema—an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking work of sheer audacity from one of the true geniuses to set foot on either side of the camera. In that interim, things have changed considerably and to watch it today is to see a work that sadly remains as vital and relevant today as it did when it first unspooled 85 years ago. It still remains one of the great screen comedies of all time, though some of the jokes hit a bit harder these days than they would have only just a few years ago.
This was, of course, the film in which Chaplin used his power as the world’s most universally famous movie star of his era (and who is still instantly recognizable throughout the globe today) to make a film that would find him lampooning someone who would become just as well-known—Adolf Hitler.
Much has been written about the parallels between the two men as they rose to the pinnacles of their respective professions—both were born within a few days of each other, they shared a number of physical similarities and both came from similar backgrounds of great poverty that helped to fuel their respective desires to succeed. Those shared desires also included artistic proclivities, though it was only Chaplin who had the gifts needed to make it along those lines. However, as Hitler embarked on his rise to power, Chaplin clearly recognized that the two had more in common than their backgrounds and penchants for tiny mustaches—he saw someone who, like himself, had gifts that allowed him to captivate and manipulate millions of people, albeit for infinitely more monstrous reasons. (The difference, beyond the obvious, is that Chaplin accomplished this without his beloved Tramp character ever speaking while Hitler only really began his rise once the sound of his voice could be heard.)
To be certain, Chaplin was not the first to look to the increasingly ominous signs coming out of Europe as a potential source of comedy. The Marx Brothers put out their masterpiece “Duck Soup”—in which Groucho becomes the dictator of Freedonia—in 1933 and while it would eventually land its place as one of the great screen comedies of all time, it would flop at the box-office when it was originally released. Later on, the Three Stooges would release the 1940 short “You Nazty Spy!,” in which Moe, Larry and Curly would be installed as the dictators of Moronica doing explicit parodies of, respectively, Hitler, Goebbels and Mussolini. (Although put into production after “The Great Dictator” commenced filming, it would arrive in theaters before Chaplin’s film and would spawn a sequel a year later in “I’ll Never Heil Again.”)
However, Chaplin was taking infinitely greater risks with his project, investing both $1.5 million of his own money and the good will engendered by his Tramp character along the way. (Technically, Chaplin retired the official Tramp character following his appearance in his previous film, “Modern Times” (1936), but no real attempt has been made to alter his look or manner here.) The risks were professional as well as personal—the film found him finally making an all-talking feature years after such things had become the norm and shifting from presenting comedic fables with a marked sentimental edge to plunging into full-on political satire.
The narrative, perhaps a tad ramshackle in construction in order to fit in all the elements that Chaplin wanted to include, begins in the midst of World War I as an unnamed man (Chaplin), a barber-turned-soldier trying, however ineptly, to defend his home country of Tomania, ends up rescuing a German pilot named Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) and flying him to safety, resulting in a crash landing that gives him amnesia. When he recovers 20 years later, he returns home to his shop and only then discovers that his country has been conquered by the dictator Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin). Hynkel’s soldiers are storming through the ghettos, smashing windows, destroying businesses and rounding up Jews. The barber, however, is spared through the intervention of Schultz, who has risen through the ranks but who nevertheless recognizes the man who saved him. Although the barber is taken in by former neighbors and falls in love with one of them (Paulette Goddard, who was married to Chaplin at the time), inevitably he ends up being thrown in a concentration camp along with Schultz, who is deemed to be disloyal by the powers-that be.
Meanwhile, Hynkel dreams of expanding his realm to rule the entire world under the symbol of the double cross. When he is unable to convince a Jewish financier to help fund his planned invasion of the neighboring country of Osterlich, he turns up his persecution of all Hebrews. He then moves on to try to make a deal with Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie), the dictator of Bacteria, but relations between the two devolve into an extended round of oneupmanship that culminates in a food fight before the deal is finally struck, with Hynkel reneging on it almost immediately. Without going into too much detail, the fortunes of both the barber and Hynkel take radical turns when each is mistaken for the other, culminating in perhaps the film’s most (in)famous sequence, which I will get to in a minute.
In the years after the production and release of “The Great Dictator,” Chaplin suggested that if he had been fully aware of the extent of the atrocities that Hitler was perpetrating, he never would have made the film in the first place so as not to risk trivializing the reality of what was happening. Whether or nor this is true is debatable, I suppose, but that is not to say that Chaplin was pulling his punches or softening things in his approach to the material here.
In the case of the aforementioned dictator-themed offerings from the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, the reality of war is used merely as fuel for an endless series of verbal and visual gags and nothing more. By contrast, Chaplin maintains a certain recognition to what was really going on at the time in ways that are both surprising and unnerving for the time. Many of those persecuted by Hynkel and his minions are explicitly presented as Jewish, for example, and this was surely one of the first films of the era to make overt reference to “concentration camps”.
The film is still funny, but there is a real pain to some of the humor, and I have the feeling that if it had been released a couple of years later, after America had entered the war and there was fuller knowledge of what Hitler was doing, it would not have been nearly as successful with audiences. It probably would have been relegated to the same fate as “To Be or Not to Be,” Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 anti-Hitler farce that is now regarded as a classic but which was rejected by audiences who felt that nothing about the subject of Hitler and the Nazis could be considered even remotely funny.
And yet, for all the anger, pain and sorrow that can be detected throughout, “The Great Dictator” remains a genuinely hilarious work with a couple of sequences that rank among the funniest and most astonishing that Chaplin ever devised. There is one where Hynkel physicalizes his desire to become ruler of the world by dancing with a giant inflatable globe to the strains of Wagner, an exquisite bit of choreography that performs the high-wire act of perfectly symbolizing his lust for power while at the same time showing how ridiculous that obsession makes him look when he is away from those who he has lured into sharing his mad vision. There is also the equally brilliant set piece showing the meeting of the minds, as it were, between Hynkel and Napaloni in which these two leaders, feared throughout the world, are depicted as little more than spoiled brats trying to present themselves as the alpha fascist in the room, at one point sitting in adjacent barber chairs that they frantically crank up in order to be at a higher level than one another.
For a movie that is, after all, a comedy, Chaplin made the decision to conclude “The Great Dictator” on an unabashedly serious and earnest note, a move that didn’t sit right with audiences at the time and is today regarded by a number of observers as the film’s one misstep. In the scene, the barber has been mistaken for Hynkel and is brought to the capital of the recently conquered Osterlich to make a victory speech that, it is assumed, is to be broadcast around the world. Following an introduction that is both antisemitic and anti-free speech, the barber delivers a long monologue in which he declares Tomania and Osterlich to be free before extolling the people of the world to rid themselves of all dictatorships, love one another and try to use the gifts of science and technology to make the world a better place. Of course, even though it becomes evident to all in the crowd early on that the man speaking is not Hynkel, no one tries to stop him from talking or attempts to cut off the microphone, perhaps the ultimate version of the old trope of “No, let’s see where he is going with this.” Speaking in his normal voice, what we are witnessing is not so much the barber speaking as Chaplin himself, bringing his story to a halt in order to speak directly to viewers.
I confess that I am of two minds when it comes to this sequence. From a comedic standpoint, it doesn’t really work because it is not amusing (not that it is trying to be) and from a narrative standpoint, it doesn’t quite work because, for all of its sincerity and good intentions, it goes on too long and leaves viewers wondering when the guy who had so famously resisted speaking in his films for so long was going to finally stop yakking. Even at the time it was made, some advised Chaplin not to end the film in such a way and that the scene would doom it at the box-office. (In fact, it became the biggest box-office success of his career and scored five Oscar nominations.) However, to wrap up this particular film with either a joke or on a note of wistful sentiment probably would not have worked either.
Instead, Chaplin decided to use his powers to try to bring the people of the world to see reason and band together to prevent the unthinkable from continuing to happen; and while it may not quite fit from a dramatic standpoint, it is a stirring bit of oratory delivered by the actor with considerable power. What is perhaps most startling about the sequence is that even though it was filmed over 85 years ago, nearly all of the sentiments contained in it remain, sadly, utterly relevant today.
Having shifted out of his Tramp persona to make that speech, Chaplin must have realized that he could not readily slip back into it and, indeed, for the remainder of his career (which would be marked by a long period in which he would be considered persona non grata in this country, in part due to the belief of some that anyone espousing the ideas featured in that speech had to be a communist), he never again played that character in any form. “Monsieur Verdoux” (1947), a dark comedy in which he played a Bluebeard type, left viewers aghast at the time, though its reputation would improve over the years. “Limelight” (1952) was a sentimental backstage drama that I will just say that others like more than I do. “A King in New York” (1957) was another political satire, though one that never cut nearly as close to the bone as his previous foray did. His final film, “A Countess in Hong Kong” (1967), is usually written off as his biggest disaster, though it does have some charms who go into it with markedly lowered expectations.
For all intents and purposes, though, “The Great Dictator” was the last big swing by one of the great artists of world cinema and regardless of what you think of his work as a whole—if you prefer the incredible, if at times cold, technical accomplishments of a Buster Keaton to his more sentimental leanings—it is impossible not to come away from it impressed by both the sheer nerve that it took to make such a thing in the first place and the sheer talent to keep it from flying off the rails and disintegrating in borderline tasteless mawkishness. That, when all is said and done, is the true reason that we at the CCFF have chosen to present this film at this time and why we would be equally pleased to present it again at some additional point in the future—hopefully at a time when it could be presented under the heading of “comedy classic” and not under “current events.”