80 years since The Great Dictator (1940)

Hoo boy.

Eighty years ago, Charlie Chaplin, well-known for his vaudeville silliness and silent movies, branched out into 'talkies', with something that was for the time very pointedly political. Before the United States--his home by then--had entered the Second World War, it wasn't exactly a given that everyone would be aligned with the message he would express here. Still, he went ahead and did it anyway, and gave us a film that, sadly, still resonates all these decades later.


Chaplin wasn't new to political satire--1936 gave us another great from him with Modern Times, which still clung onto his silent roles, bar one hilarious song number. Essentially a piece on the charming topic of the dehumanization of industrialization, he combined that with the sense of visual comedy that you pretty much had to perfect when all the audio you had were piano tunes. Still, at the time, it would've been all too relatable and biting in the Great Depression era, and frankly is still worth a watch now--but come the era of sound, come a bigger budget for Chaplin, and he gave both barrels to what was now rising over the pond.

So, that's how we open up with Chaplin playing a Jewish soldier fighting for 'Tomania' in the final days of WWI, with malfunctioning artillery and screwed up orders aplenty. Given that the Great War was still very much in living memory, it was pretty ballsy to do so--but, with sympathy for fascism not exactly silent in the US circa that time, what came next was even more so. Chaplin saw the grand speechifying and over the top mannerisms of a Mr. Adolf Hitler, and turned it completely on itself, with a speech in gibberish so exaggerated that even the microphones recoil. And from there, he's just getting started. 

Of course, at this time, the worst aspects of Nazism were still covered up--people knew concentration camps existed, but all the horrors and connotations we have would not kick in until later, and weren't fully discovered until the end of WW2. So, compared to, say, Schindler's List, scenes set in the Jewish ghetto of Tomania might come off as...a little naive. It doesn't hold back in boiling down the oppression going on there to small-minded bullying, but then Chaplin would admit that he known the full extent of things, he might've reconsidered. Either way, around this time we get Paulette Goddard introduced as a neighbor and friend to the aforementioned Jewish soldier-turned-barber--who, by coincidence, looks exactly like 'Adenoid Hynkel'. 

And it's with Hynkel that Chaplin gives us the most memorable moments. He even pre-empts the obsession with 'wonder weapons' that the Nazis fixated on in the war, with the 'Fooey' being pestered by idiots blowing money on armor and guns less functional than an Acer laptop. Chaplin brings back his old vaudeville physicality with one memorable number where Hynkel dances with a globe, in what seems slightly creepy now combining the graceful music with what's explicitly a man's god complex mania. And the most hilarious parts of it all come when Mussolini gets it too--Jack Oakie steals the show in the last half as 'Benzino Napoloni', bragging of his nation's 'aerial marine tanks, that go under the water and fly uppa the stairs?'

But this comes down to the real moment--when, at the end, that humble and mild-mannered barber is mistaken for the dictator, and is forced to put on a speech before his assembled forces. Here, Chaplin drops the comedy and slapstick, and pours out in his heart in a moment of cinema that, eighty years on, still speaks truer as it ever did:

That's what still makes this film a favorite of mine all these decades later. Not all of it may have completely aged, but what better way to tear down the mystique and image that dictators tried to clad themselves in by just reducing their pomposity to ridiculousness. Even back then, when armies marched over Europe, some people like Chaplin refused to cow, even if others around them didn't--and this paved the way for the likes of Mel Brooks, people for whom all this may have been closer to home than others, to really screw the nail in Hitler's coffin. There's nothing like laughter and mockery to shred all that madmen that thought themselves great tried to create.

And, well, if only passionate speeches would be enough to end such things forever.