- It must have been difficult for Charlie Chaplin to decide how to approach The Great Dictator. On one hand, the fact that the world's most infamous and powerful despot had a toothbrush mustache represented a once-in-a-lifetime comedic opportunity. On the other hand, this is Hitler we're talking about, and things were already bad enough in 1940 that it would have been both irresponsible and unprofitable to make a straight-up comedy about the Nazi leader. Thus, we end up with a film that is alternately hilarious and preachy. I'll say this for Chaplin: he's never afraid to mix tones.
- In this case, Chaplin plays a WWI veteran whose humorous battlefield antics are more than compensated for by his heroic rescue of a pilot named Schultz (Reginald Gardiner). Their traumatic escape, however, deprives the hero of his memory until the eve of the Second World War, whereupon he tries to resume his life as a barber. Unfortunately, his homeland of Tomania is not what it once was. In between the two wars, Tomania has fallen under the control of the dastardly Adenoid Hynkel (also played by Chaplin) who decrees that the Jewish ghetto is to be purged. Although the noble Tomanian Jews, including an older man named Jaeckel (Maurice Moscovitch) and the barber's love interest Hannah (Paulette Goddard), put up a good fight, it will be the bravery of that goofy barber that saves his people, his country, and the world.
- Whatever else it may have accomplished, The Great Dictator certainly proved that Chaplin had successfully transitioned to the sound era. Many of the funniest moments in the film are language-based puns that never would have worked in silent pictures. Seriously, try not to laugh when you hear that The Fuhrer (I'm sorry, "The Phooey") is named Adenoid Hynkel, that his advisors are Garbitsch (Henry Daniell) and Herring (Billy Gilbert), and that his Italian counterpart is Napaloni (Jack Oakie). And then there's that clever quip in which the barber explains that he is more "vegetarian" than "Aryan." Probably my favorite moment in the film arrives when Hynkel completes a presumably vicious anti-Semitic tirade in nonsensical German only to have it summarized in English tersely as having "referred to the Jewish people."
- Of course, that's not to say that Chaplin completely left the silent era behind. One of the film's most justifiably famous scenes displays Hynkel executing an ominous ballet to the music of Wagner, all while juggling the globe in his hands. Equally clever but less satirical is the barber's performance to Hungarian Dance #5 that surely must have inspired Chuck Jones and the Warner Brothers animators some ten years later. Those inspired updates to The Thinker and The Venus de Milo are purely visual, too, as is the film's fundamental gag, namely that a certain ruthless Germanic dictator actually does look a lot like the Little Tramp.
- Paradoxically, the weakest part of the film is also the most challenging for me to criticize. When Chaplin has the barber make his final impassioned speech, there is no question that the actor has gone completely out of character. Such moments have always bothered me in films from that era (Foreign Correspondent and All Through the Night quickly come to mind) because they seem to imply that the audience is so obtuse that we need to be lectured directly. Honestly, would anyone who appreciated the rest of The Great Dictator not have recognized the threat the Nazis represented? Still, if you have to include an inappropriately explicit plea to the audience, I suppose I can't begrudge one that so eloquently criticizes one of history's most horrible regimes.
- This was Chaplin's first sound film.
