When it was released in October, 1940, Charlie Chaplin's anti-Hitler satire "The Great Dictator" was one year ahead of its time and thirteen years out of date.
It was ahead of its time because, one year before Pearl Harbor, America was not yet ready to see Hitler as a dangerous madman who would not be satisfied until he had conquered the world . (In fact, Chaplin started work on the film in 1937, before Hitler had even invaded Poland.)
Yet it was out of date because most of the dialogue and some of the humor in this, Chaplin's first talkie, was creaky and old-fashioned. In the years since "The Jazz Singer," Hollywood had been busy figuring out how to use dialogue to make fast-paced, sophisticated comedies like "It Happened One Night" or "Bringing Up Baby." Meanwhile, Chaplin had stuck to silents like his masterpiece "City Lights" and the fine "Modern Times." As a result, "The Great Dictator" feels like what it was: the first talkie of a man who had made 76 silent films.
The decades since have not been kind to "The Great Dictator". The humor has only grown creakier, while the knowledge that Hitler was a menace to everything good is now commonplace. In fact, given what we now know, the film's satire seems almost gentle. There are references to concentration camps, but Chaplin seems to have thought of them simply as large-scale prisons. Indeed, Chaplin later wrote that, if he had been aware of the full scale of the horrors that were going on, he could never have made this movie. Although one nameless character is introduced on screen in order to be shot moments later, just about the worst thing that happens to any of the Jewish main characters is being pelted with tomatoes. Of course, one can't blame Chaplin for not imagining the unimaginable horrors that were taking place. Given the information Chaplin had available to him, it took remarkable insight and courage to make such a strongly anti-Nazi film.
Chaplin's Tramp mannerisms worked beautifully in silent films, allowing him to convey a character's thoughts and emotions perfectly without speaking a line. While he's smart enough to tone down those mannerisms for the sound era, he doesn't tone them down quite enough, and the result is that he occasionally seems a little bit hammy (particularly in the film's early sequences.) Similarly, Paulette Godard, who was perfect as the gamine in "Modern Times," comes across as a little bit of an over-actor. It doesn't help that her spunky, can-do American gal nature seems out of place in a washerwoman in a European ghetto.
It also doesn't help that the dialogue Chaplin wrote for her, and everybody else, varies from the serviceable to the clunky, and is full of long pauses. One example: "Look at that star {LONG PAUSE} Isn't it beautiful? {LONG PAUSE} One thing Hynkel with all of his power can't touch is that."
Still, there are a few bright spots, in the form of several silent (or, at least, dialogue-free ) sequences. There's a delightful scene in a barber shop set to "Hungarian Rhapsody," and a genuinely funny sequence as Chaplin and friends try to avoid being chosen for a plot to kill "Adenoid Hynkel." And Chaplin's first appearance as Hynkel, spritzing into a set of microphones in mock-German gibberish, works, too, although the fake-German slowly wears thin as the movie goes on. (If you get your hands on the DVD and want a quick tour of the highlights, watch chapters 2, 7, 8, and 10.)
All in all, "The Great Dictator" earns an A+ for its efforts to rouse America to the menace of Nazism... and a C for artistic merit.
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