Cinema Revisited: The Great Dictator (1940)

Released in 1940, a “Baker’s Dozen” years after the talking-picture revolution, The Great Dictator shows silent-screen icon Charlie Chaplin finally conceding to the new format by confronting it head-on with a film that was both topical and challenging. Unlike Buster Keaton, Chaplin was not as interested in cinema's technology, preferring to concentrate on character and narrative.. A fascinated Keaton wanted to experiment with sound on film, but was given almost no opportunity by anti-creative studio heads. Chaplin, who enjoyed full creative control over his projects, continued to release silents well after talking pictures had become the norm. Chaplin claimed, in interviews, that if his beloved Little Tramp character were allowed to have a specific language, he would no longer be a universal Everyman. Thus, his only releases during the 1930s—City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936)—were largely silent, save for music Chaplin himself composed, as well as carefully orchestrated sound effects. His choice to allow us to hear the Little Tramp’s voice in the latter film was via a musical number done in gibberish.

Chaplin’s success releasing silent films during the talking-picture era shows how much power the comedian had by that point in his career. Reports in movie-trade magazines as early as 1929 stated how theaters that were not yet equipped to show sound movies were losing business. Mediocre early talkies were drawing several times more than some of the best silent films. By the time Chaplin was filming Modern Times, studios were cutting up their dramatic silent features, which had been box-office successes only five years earlier, overdubbing silly music and wisecracking narration, and releasing them as sarcastic short comedies. Exhibitor H.E. Hoag stated in 1930: “A silent comedy is very flat now. In fact, for the past two years, my audiences seldom laughed out loud at a silent.”

The bigger studios hastily transformed recently shot silent features into talkies by dubbing in voices and sound effects (a noted example is Welcome Danger (1929), Harold Lloyd's earliest feature to use sound). By the 1930’s sound movies were so firmly established, only someone with the creative control of Charlie Chaplin was able to pull off making a silent picture and enjoying a lofty level of success. One theater in Wisconsin reported record attendance for City Lights, despite snowstorms that closed roads. People were said to have walked through blizzard conditions to see the film.

As the Third Reich came to power in Germany and began characterizing Jewish people negatively, word got back to Chaplin that a 1934 booklet entitled The Jews Are Watching You had been published, claiming that he was of Jewish heritage. A caricature of Chaplin, lengthening his nose and emphasizing his dark curly hair, referred to the comedian as a “little Jewish tumbler,” who was “as disgusting as he is boring.” Chaplin was not Jewish, but refused to deny it, believing such a denial would be “playing into the hands of the anti-Semites.” There had already been comments regarding the fact that Hitler wore a mustache similar to Charlie. When writing the script, Chaplin decided he would play two roles in The Great Dictator. The Jewish barber would be an extension of his classic Little Tramp. The other character would be dictator Adenoid Hynkel, the little barber’s doppleganger.

Watching footage of Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Chaplin interpreted the dictator’s eye-bulging, nostril-flaring, animated movement as a good subject for comic parody. Chaplin viewed Hitler as a buffoon whose physical performance appeared to be a throwback to the comedian’s own Keystone period, where such florid gestures were central to every comic’s performance. Investigating the dictator’s life, Chaplin was intrigued to discover that they were born only days apart in April of 1889, that both experienced poverty and similar parental issues, and that they shared certain interests (including an affinity for composer Richard Wagner’s music).

The Great Dictator shows a real evolution in Chaplin’s work from silent to sound comedy. The opening sequences, featuring the barber as a soldier on the battlefield, are a series of physical gags. The barber battles a faulty missile, has a live grenade slip down his sleeve as he rears back to throw it, and ineffectively mans a large antiaircraft gun that twists and flips him around as he attempts to maneuver the weapon. It is all very much like silent comedy, with vocal reactions obviously dubbed in during postproduction, and the action occasionally speeded up to faster motion. At one point during the battlefield sequence, smoke from the weapons fills the screen and the barber gets separated from unit. Walking through the smoke, the barber calls out “yoo hoo” in an attempt to find his fellow soldiers. There is no image on the screen, just the sound of the barber calling out. Hence, in his first talkie, Chaplin features a brief scene where there is sound and no picture. When the film shifts to the dictator giving a speech, however, it becomes quite noisy, with blatant gestures and shouting dialog. Hynkel’s German is Teutonic-sounding gibberish, with occasional words like “sauerkraut” and “wienerschnitzel” tossed in.

Throughout the film, Chaplin goes back and forth between the dictator’s life and the barber’s. Hynkel is surrounded by incompetence, on a furious quest to gain absolute power, too busy to stop for more than a few seconds to allow a portrait artist and a sculptor to work on his likeness. The barber’s life, which had been quiet and settled before the war, has now become tumultuous. The storm-troopers painting “Jew” on his window, and their fighting him when he tries to wash it off, confuses the barber, who has returned home after a years-long recovery from a war injury. Between these two characters, Chaplin presents one as overbearing, the other as unassuming. Their resemblance is coincidental.

These parallels continue during two of the most celebrated sequences in the film, both of which are silent set pieces. In the first, the dictator dances a ballet with a globe balloon, delicately tapping it into the air with his hand or foot as Wagner’s prelude to Lohengrin accents the scene. As the balloon floats down, he embraces it, causing it to pop in his face. Such is Chaplin’s symbolic statement regarding Hitler’s ultimate success in conquering the world.

The second sequence, following immediately after this one, shows the barber shaving a customer to the tune of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance, deftly timing his efforts to the rhythm, from applying leather to the actual scraping of the face.

The film again gets noisy with dialog once Jack Oakie arrives as Napolini in a Benito Mussolini parody. Oakie’s loud, bombastic style is another contrast with Chaplin’s quieter method and, to the comedian’s credit, he allows Oakie to steal virtually every scene in which they appear together. Chaplin is quiet but very much a part of the scene. He does no tricks, just reacts very subtlely to Oakie’s bombast. Mr. Oakie later recalled that it was the high point of his career.

The Great Dictator concludes with the barber assuming Hynkel’s identity and offering an impassioned speech for the radio that effectively reverses all of the suppressive policies of the dictator. It was at one time accused of being communist by the right and dismissed as sentimental by the left, but it has since grown in popularity, and has been frequently shared in various social media. From a cinematic perspective, the final speech is significant that it features Chaplin commanding a scene with pure dialog, ending his first talkie with an extended soliloquy.

The filming of The Great Dictator draws from a variety of influences. First, and perhaps least discussed, is the fact that Chaplin’s own half-brother Sydney once wrote, directed, and starred in a film entitled King, Queen and Joker (1921), in which he played the dual role of a barber and the ruler of a country. This could perhaps have provided some of the inspiration for the story once Chaplin decided to parody Hitler. The balloon/globe sequence goes back to Chaplin performing a similar bit at a party during the 1920s (he was filmed, and the footage survives). The idea of using comedy to present a message dates back at least as far as Chaplin’s 1916 Mutual production, The Immigrant, which investigates the treatment of people coming to America from overseas.

The Great Dictator finally had its general release, after several sneak previews, following two years of constant publicity about its filming. One particularly interesting result of the fanfare this film received while it was being filmed was that Columbia Pictures short-subjects producer Jules White borrowed the idea for his own satire on dictatorship featuring his popular Three Stooges. Since two-reel comedies were produced much more quickly than feature-length pictures, the Stooges’ comedy You Nazty Spy (1940) came out several months before The Great Dictator. This two-reeler, with Moe Howard offering a commendable Hitler parody of his own, was one of the trio’s biggest hits, spawning the sequel I’ll Never Heil Again (1943).

Upon its release, The Great Dictator was quite popular with moviegoers and critics. Chaplin not only broke ground by making his first talkie, he also presented an honest, thoroughgoing portrait of the Jewish people at a time when they were poorly represented in English-speaking films. It may have been the novelty of hearing Chaplin speak, the topical storyline, or both, but The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s biggest box-office success. In England, the critic for The New Statesman and Nation called The Great Dictator“the best heartener we could have.” Basil Wright in The Spectator praised it as representing “undeniable greatness.” American critics were equally impressed, even at a time when ninety-six percent of all Americans opposed entering the war in Europe. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times stated:

“…no picture ever made has promised more momentous consequences. The prospect of little “Charlot,” the most universally loved character in all the world, directing his superlative talent for ridicule against the most dangerously evil man alive has loomed as a titanic jest, a transcendent paradox. And the happy report this morning is that it comes off magnificently.… a truly superb accomplishment by a truly great artist—and, from one point of view, perhaps the most significant film ever produced.”

What is perhaps even more interesting is the reaction of period moviegoers, especially this comment from a theater owner in Detroit, Michigan, who submitted his comment to The Motion Picture Herald:

“I personally class this as an outstanding masterpiece. Chaplin had the nerve to show the world what Nazism means, so to that extent it is an anti-Nazi picture, but also gave us a great deal of the Chaplin humor which was Chaplin at his funniest. Regarding the much-discussed speech at the end, we have a good percentage of roughnecks and what may be termed the lower classes, and often it is hard to maintain strict order and quiet. But this mixed audience, and it was a good sized crowd, were so quiet during the speech you could almost hear a pin drop, and a burst of applause at the end that would have done Chaplin’s heart good to hear.”

Adolf Hitler was furious that Chaplin dared parody him, and The Great Dictator was banned from all occupied countries. Hitler’s curiosity was too much for him to contain, however, and he arranged for a print to be shipped in through Portugal. Reportedly Hitler screened The Great Dictator privately for himself on two different occasions, but, unfortunately, history did not record his reaction to the film. Upon hearing of this, Chaplin stated, “I’d give anything to know what he thought of it.”

The film was nominated for five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Jack Oakie), and Best Original Score (Meredith Wilson). Chaplin won best actor awards from National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle. In 1997, The Great Dictator was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”