The Great Dictator

On the Western Front in 1918, a Jewish Private (Charlie Chaplin) fighting for the Central Powers nation of Tomainia[7] valiantly saves the life of a wounded pilot, Commander Schultz (Reginald Gardiner), who carries valuable documents that could secure a Tomainian victory. However, their plane crashes mid-flight, and the Private subsequently suffers memory loss. Upon being rescued, Schultz is informed that Tomainia has officially surrendered to the Allied Forces, while the Private is carried off to a hospital.

Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel.

Twenty years later, still suffering from amnesia, the Private leaves the hospital to return to his previous profession as a barber in the ghetto. The ghetto is now governed by Schultz, who has been promoted in the Tomainian regime under the ruthless dictator Adenoid Hynkel (also Chaplin).

The Barber falls in love with a neighbor, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and together they try to resist persecution by military forces. The troops capture the Barber and are about to hang him, but Schultz recognizes him and restrains them. By recognizing him, and reminding him of World War I, Schultz helps the Barber regain his memory.

Meanwhile, Hynkel tries to finance his ever-growing military forces by borrowing money from a Jewish banker called Hermann Epstein, but the banker refuses to lend him the money. Furious, Hynkel orders a purge of the Jews. Schultz protests this inhumane policy and is sent to a concentration camp. He escapes and hides in the ghetto with the Barber. Schultz tries to persuade the Jewish family to assassinate Hynkel in a suicide attack, but they are dissuaded by Hannah. Troops search the ghetto, arrest Schultz and the Barber, and send both to a concentration camp. Hannah and her family flee to freedom at a vineyard in the neighboring country of Osterlich.

Hynkel has a dispute with the dictator of the nation of Bacteria, a man named Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie), over which country should invade Osterlich. The two dictators argue over a treaty to govern the invasion, while dining together at an elaborate buffet, which happens to provide a jar of "English Mustard". The quarrel becomes heated and descends into a food fight, which is only resolved when both men eat the hot mustard and are shocked into cooperating. After signing the treaty with Napaloni, Hynkel orders the invasion of Osterlich. Hannah and her family are trapped by the invading force and beaten by a squad of arriving soldiers. The squad leader strikes Hannah to the ground, stands over her, and cruelly eats her basket of grapes.

Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel with Jack Oakie as Benzino Napaloni.

Escaping from the camp in stolen uniforms, Schultz and the Barber, dressed as Hynkel, arrive at the Osterlich frontier, where a huge victory-parade is waiting to be addressed by Hynkel. The real Hynkel is mistaken for the Barber while out duck hunting in civilian clothes and is knocked out and taken to the camp. Schultz tells the Barber to go to the platform and impersonate Hynkel, as the only way to save their lives once they reach Osterlich's capital. The Barber has never given a public speech in his life, but he has no other choice.

The terrified Barber mounts the steps but is inspired to seize the initiative. Announcing that he (as Hynkel) has had a change of heart, he makes an impassioned plea for brotherhood and goodwill.

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible. Jew—Gentile—Black Man, White. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness. Not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. And this world has room for everyone, and the good Earth is rich can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives us abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men—cries out for universal brotherhood—for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world—millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say—do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed—the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ...

Soldiers!-don't give yourselves to brutes—men who despise you—enslave you—who regiment your lives—tell you what to do—what to think and what to feel! Who drill you—diet you—treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate—the unloved and the unnatural!

Soldiers!-Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: "the Kingdom of God is within man"—not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power—the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then—in the name of democracy—let us use that power—let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world—a decent world that will give men a chance to work—that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world—to do away with national barriers—to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!"

Finally, he addresses a message of hope to Hannah, in case she can hear him.

"Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us."[8]

Hannah hears the Barber's voice on the radio. She turns her face, radiant with joy and hope, toward the sunlight, and says to her fellows: "Listen."

According to Jürgen Trimborn's biography of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, both Chaplin and French filmmaker René Clair viewed Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will together at a showing at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel reports that Clair was horrified by the power of the film, crying out that this should never be shown or the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film. He used it to inspire many elements of The Great Dictator, and by repeatedly viewing this film, Chaplin could closely mimic Hitler's mannerisms.[11]

Trimborn suggests that Chaplin decided to proceed with making The Great Dictator after viewing Riefenstahl's film.[12] Hynkel's rally speech near the beginning of the film, delivered in German-sounding gibberish, is a caricature of Hitler's oratory style, which Chaplin also studied carefully in newsreels.[13]

The film was directed by Chaplin (with his half-brother Wheeler Dryden as assistant director), and written and produced by Chaplin. The film was shot largely at the Charlie Chaplin Studios and other locations around Los Angeles.[14] The elaborate World War I scenes were filmed in Laurel Canyon. Chaplin and Meredith Willson composed the music. Filming began in September 1939 (coincidentally soon after Germany invaded Poland, triggering World War II) and finished six months later.

Chaplin wanted to address the escalating violence and repression of Jews by the Nazis throughout the late 1930s, the magnitude of which was conveyed to him personally by his European Jewish friends and fellow artists. The Third Reich's repressive nature and militarist tendencies were well-known at the time. Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not To Be dealt with similar themes, and also used a mistaken-identity Hitler figure. But Chaplin later said that he would not have made the film had he known of the true extent of the Nazis' crimes.[4] After the horror of the Holocaust became known, filmmakers struggled for nearly 20 years to find the right angle and tone to satirize the era.[15]

In the period when Hitler and his Nazi Party rose to prominence, Chaplin was becoming internationally popular. He was mobbed by fans on a 1931 trip to Berlin, which annoyed the Nazis. Resenting his style of comedy, they published a book titled The Jews Are Looking at You (1934), describing the comedian as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat" (although Chaplin was not Jewish). Ivor Montagu, a close friend of Chaplin, relates that he sent the comedian a copy of the book and always believed that Chaplin decided to retaliate with making Dictator.[16]

In the 1930s cartoonists and comedians often built on Hitler and Chaplin having similar mustaches. Chaplin also capitalized on this resemblance in order to give his Little Tramp character a "reprieve".[17]

In his memoir My Father, Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin's son Charlie Jr. described his father as being haunted by the similarities in background between him and Hitler; they were born four days apart in April 1889, and both had risen to their present heights from poverty. He wrote:

Their destinies were poles apart. One was to make millions weep, while the other was to set the whole world laughing. Dad could never think of Hitler without a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. "Just think", he would say uneasily, "he's the madman, I'm the comic. But it could have been the other way around."[18]

Chaplin prepared the story throughout 1938 and 1939, and began filming in September 1939, six days after the beginning of World War II. He finished filming almost six months later. The 2002 TV documentary on the making of the film, The Tramp and the Dictator,[19] presented newly discovered footage of the film production (shot by Chaplin's elder half-brother Sydney) which showed Chaplin's initial attempts at the film's ending, filmed before the fall of France.[4]

According to The Tramp and the Dictator, Chaplin arranged to send the film to Hitler, and an eyewitness confirmed he saw it.[4] Hitler's architect and friend Albert Speer denied that the leader had ever seen it.[20] Hitler's response to the film is not recorded, but another account tells that he viewed the film twice.[21]

Some of the signs in the shop windows of the ghetto in the film are written in Esperanto, a language which Hitler condemned as a Jewish plot to internationalize and destroy German culture, perhaps because its founder was a Polish Jew.[22]

The film was Chaplin's first true talking picture and helped shake off criticism of Luddism following his previous release, the mostly dialogue-free Modern Times (1936), after the silent era had all but ended in the late 1920s. The Great Dictator does feature several scenes without dialogue more in keeping with Chaplin's earlier films.

The score was written and directed by Meredith Willson, later known as composer and librettist of the 1957 musical comedy The Music Man:

I've seen [Chaplin] take a sound track and cut it all up and paste it back together and come up with some of the dangdest effects you ever heard—effects a composer would never think of. Don't kid yourself about that one. He would have been great at anything—music, law, ballet dancing, or painting—house, sign, or portrait. I got the screen credit for The Great Dictator music score, but the best parts of it were all Chaplin's ideas, like using the Lohengrin "Prelude" in the famous balloon-dance scene.[23]

According to Willson, the scene in which Chaplin shaves a customer to Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 had been filmed before he arrived, using a phonograph record for timing. Willson's task was to re-record it with the full studio orchestra, fitting the music to the action. They had planned to do it painstakingly, recording eight measures or less at a time, after running through the whole scene to get the overall idea. Chaplin decided to record the run-through in case anything was usable. Willson later wrote, "by dumb luck we had managed to catch every movement, and that was the first and only 'take' made of the scene, the one used in the finished picture".[23]

Chaplin in the globe scene

James L. Neibaur has noted that among the many parallels that Chaplin noted between his own life and Hitler's was an affinity for Wagner's music.[24] Chaplin's appreciation for Wagner has been noted in studies of the director's use of film music.[25] Many commentators have noted Chaplin's use of Wagner's Lohengrin prelude when Hynkel dances with the globe-balloon.[24][26][27] Chaplin repeated use of the Lohengrin prelude near the conclusion, when the exiled Hannah listens to the Jewish barber's speech celebrating democracy and freedom.[28] The music is interrupted during the dictator's dance but it is heard to climax and completion in the barber's pro-democracy speech.

Commenting on this, Lutz Peter Koepnick writes in 2002,

How can Wagner at once help emphasize a progressivist vision of human individualism and a fascist preview of absolute domination? How can the master's music simultaneously signify a desire for lost emotional integrity and for authoritative grandeur? Chaplin's dual use of Lohengrin points towards unsettling conjunctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Like Adorno, Chaplin understands Wagner as a signifier of both: the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the total work of art, and the origin of mass culture out of the spirit of the most arduous aesthetic program of the 19th century. Unlike Adorno [who identifies American mass culture and fascist spectacle], Chaplin wants his audience to make crucial distinctions between competing Wagnerianisms...Both...rely on the driving force of utopian desires, on...the promise of self-transcendence and authentic collectivity, but they channel these mythic longings in fundamentally different directions. Although [Chaplin] exposes the puzzling modernity of Nazi politics, Chaplin is unwilling to write off either Wagner or industrial culture. [Chaplin suggests] Hollywood needs Wagner as never before in order to at once condemn the use of fantasy in fascism and warrant the utopian possibilities in industrial culture.[29]

Chaplin's film was released nine months after Hollywood's first parody of Hitler, the short subject You Nazty Spy! by the Three Stooges, which premiered in January 1940.[30] Chaplin had been planning his feature-length work for years, and began filming in September 1939. Hitler had been previously allegorically pilloried in the German film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, by Fritz Lang.

The film was well received in the United States at the time of its release, and was popular with the American public. The film was also popular in the United Kingdom, drawing 9 million to the cinemas,[31] despite Chaplin's fears that wartime audiences would dislike a comedy about a dictator. It was the second-most popular movie in the US in 1941.[32]

The film was banned in several Latin American countries, where there were active movements of Nazi sympathizers.[33]

During the film's production, the British government had announced that it would prohibit its exhibition in the United Kingdom, in keeping with its appeasement policy concerning Nazi Germany.[34] But by the time the film was released, the UK was at war with Germany and the film was welcomed in part for its obvious propaganda value. In 1941, London's Prince of Wales Theatre screened its UK premiere. The film had been banned in many parts of Europe, and the theatre's owner, Alfred Esdaile, was apparently fined for showing it.[35]

When the film was released in France in 1945, it became the most popular film of the year, with admissions of 8,280,553.[36] In 2010, The Guardian considered it the 22nd-best comedy film of all time.[37]

Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance concludes his lengthy examination of the film, in his book Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, by asserting the film's importance among the great film satires. Vance writes, "Chaplin's The Great Dictator survives as a masterful integration of comedy, politics and satire. It stands as Chaplin's most self-consciously political work and the cinema's first important satire."[38]

Vance further reports that a refugee from Germany who had worked in the film division of the Nazi Ministry of Culture before deciding to flee told Chaplin that Hitler had watched the movie twice, entirely alone both times. Chaplin replied that he would "... give anything to know what he thought of it."[39]

Chaplin's Tramp character and the Jewish barber

Chaplin (as the barber) absentmindedly tries to shave Goddard (as Hannah) in this image from the film trailer.

There is no critical consensus on the relationship between Chaplin's earlier Tramp character and the film's Jewish barber, but the trend is to view the barber as a variation on the theme. French film director François Truffaut later noted that early in the production, Chaplin said he would not play The Tramp in a sound film.[40] Turner Classic Movies says that years later, Chaplin acknowledged a connection between The Tramp and the barber. Specifically, "There is some debate as to whether the unnamed Jewish barber is intended as the Tramp's final incarnation. Although in his autobiography he refers to the barber as the Little Tramp, Chaplin said in 1937 that he would not play the Little Tramp in his sound pictures."[41] In My Autobiography, Chaplin would write, "Of course! As Hitler I could harangue the crowds all I wished. And as the tramp, I could remain more or less silent." The New York Times, in its original review (16 October 1940), specifically sees him as the tramp. However, in the majority of his so-called tramp films, he was not literally playing a tramp. In his review of the film years after its release, Roger Ebert says, "Chaplin was technically not playing the Tramp." He also writes, "He [Chaplin] put the Little Tramp and $1.5 million of his own money on the line to ridicule Hitler."[42]

Critics who view the barber as different include Stephen Weissman, whose book Chaplin: A Life speaks of Chaplin "abandoning traditional pantomime technique and his little tramp character".[43] DVD reviewer Mark Bourne asserts Chaplin's stated position: "Granted, the barber bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp, even affecting the familiar bowler hat and cane. But Chaplin was clear that the barber is not the Tramp and The Great Dictator is not a Tramp movie."[44] The Scarecrow Movie Guide also views the barber as different.[45]

Annette Insdorf, in her book Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (2003), writes that "There was something curiously appropriate about the little tramp impersonating the dictator, for by 1939 Hitler and Chaplin were perhaps the two most famous men in the world. The tyrant and the tramp reverse roles in The Great Dictator, permitting the eternal outsider to address the masses".[46] In The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies (1998), Kathryn Bernheimer writes, "What he chose to say in The Great Dictator, however, was just what one might expect from the Little Tramp. Film scholars have often noted that the Little Tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure, the ostracized outcast, an outsider."[47]

Several reviewers of the late 20th century describe the Little Tramp as developing into the Jewish barber. In Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Thomas Schatz writes of "Chaplin's Little Tramp transposed into a meek Jewish barber",[48] while, in Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929–1939, Colin Shindler writes, "The universal Little Tramp is transmuted into a specifically Jewish barber whose country is about to be absorbed into the totalitarian empire of Adenoid Hynkel."[49] Finally, in A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, J. P. Telotte writes that "The little tramp figure is here reincarnated as the Jewish barber".[50]

A two-page discussion of the relationship between the barber and The Tramp appears in Eric L. Flom's book Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies. He concludes:

Perhaps the distinction between the two characters would be more clear if Chaplin hadn't relied on some element of confusion to attract audiences to the picture. With The Great Dictator's twist of mistaken identity, the similarity between the Barber and the Tramp allowed Chaplin break [sic] with his old persona in the sense of characterization, but to capitalize on him in a visual sense. The similar nature of the Tramp and Barber characterizations may have been an effort by Chaplin to maintain his popularity with filmgoers, many of whom by 1940 had never seen a silent picture during the silent era. Chaplin may have created a new character from the old, but he nonetheless counted on the Charlie person to bring audiences into the theaters for his first foray into sound, and his boldest political statement to date.[51]

Chaplin's half-brother Sydney directed and starred in a 1921 film called King, Queen, Joker in which, like Chaplin, he played the dual role of a barber and ruler of a country which is about to be overthrown. More than twenty years later, in 1947, Charles Chaplin was sued over alleged plagiarism with The Great Dictator. Yet, apparently, neither the suing party nor Chaplin himself brought up his own brother's King, Queen, Joker of the silent era.[52] The case, Bercovici v. Chaplin, was settled, with Chaplin paying Konrad Bercovici $95,000.[53] Bercovici claimed that he had created ideas such as Chaplin playing a dictator and a dance with a globe, and that Chaplin had discussed his five-page outline for a screenplay with him for several hours.[34] But Chaplin insisted in his autobiography that he had been the sole writer of the movie's script. He agreed to a settlement, because of his "unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next."[54]

The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Beverly Hills, California, has a copy of The Great Dictator script. The library permits viewers of the script to read it and take notes, but as with all of its script collection prohibits photocopying of it.[55]

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".[5]

In 2000, the American Film Institute ranked the film No. 37 in its "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list.[56]

The film holds a 92% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 37 reviews, three of which are negative.[57]

A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in May 2011. The extras feature color production footage shot by Chaplin's half-brother Sydney, a deleted barbershop sequence from Chaplin's 1919 film Sunnyside, a barbershop sequence from Sydney Chaplin's 1921 film King, Queen, Joker, a visual essay by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance titled "The Clown Turns Prophet", and The Tramp and the Dictator (2001), Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft's documentary exploring the lives of Chaplin and Hitler, including interviews with author Ray Bradbury, director Sidney Lumet, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, and others. It has a booklet featuring an essay by film critic Michael Wood, Chaplin's 1940 The New York Times defense of his movie, a reprint from critic Jean Narboni on the film's final speech, and Al Hirschfeld's original press book illustrations.[58]

The Great Dictator influenced numerous directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, Mel Brooks, Wes Anderson, and Chuck Jones and inspired such films as The Dictator, The Interview, and Jojo Rabbit.

Sean McArdle and Jon Judy's Eisner Award-nominated comic book, The Führer and the Tramp, is set during the production of The Great Dictator. [59]

• Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), possibly the first American anti-Nazi film
• To Be or Not to Be (February 15, 1942), a dark comedy about living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw (also remade in 1983 by Mel Brooks)

Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Great Dictator

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Great Dictator (film).

• The Great Dictator on IMDb
• The Great Dictator at AllMovie
• The Great Dictator at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Great Dictator: The Joker and the Madman an essay by Michael Wood at the Criterion Collection
• "The Great Dictator (1940) The Screen in Review", Bosley Crowther Wallace, The New York Times, October 16, 1940
• The title character gives a speech