Classics Corner: The Great Dictator

When I am not playing critic extraordinaire, I moonlight as a World History teacher. One of the wonderful aspects of the job is sharing films with my students (and not just because movies have the uncanny ability to silence fifteen year olds). It is an interesting experience for me because I end up watching the movie five times, once with each class. As a result I end up with a better understanding of the piece than I had before I decided to screen it the first place (it also means that I can recite Super Size Me line for line, probably in reverse if needed).
Last week, just as the students were preparing for Spring Break, we watched Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Screening the movie repeatedly left me with a few thoughts about the film, its triumphs, and its flaws.
It is striking how brave The Great Dictator is as parody and as social criticism. It was far easier for Mel Brooks to make fun of Hitler in The Producers some twenty-two years after his demise. It was far less subversive for Roberto Benigni to do it in Life is Beautiful which actually seems quaint by comparison. Charlie Chaplin began his film in 1937 (it was not finished and released until 1940) while the Furer was very much alive and still amassing power. Not only that but it was made at a time when the United States was not directly involved in the war so, unlike many of the Loony Tunes of the period which lampoon the Axis powers, this is not a propaganda piece. Chaplin takes a position far from the one actually used to enter the war: Hitler should be stopped for what he is doing to the Jews, not because of what he might eventually do to the United States. For the time this was quite a bold statement.
Besides being writer and director Chaplin takes on the film’s two main roles: that of a Jewish barber and of Adenoid Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania. As the World’s greatest clown, Chaplin knows exactly how to harness his skills for maximum satirical effect. The barber’s encounter with the brown shirts and Hynkel’s ballet routine with an inflatable globe stand out as the most humorous and biting pieces of the film. It is wondrous to watch Chaplin’s use of vaudeville, an art so closely linked to the Jewish community, to tear Hitler’s façade as a modern leader to pieces.
The Great Dictator should be considered a masterpiece, but it is a flawed masterpiece. Chaplin’s first speaking role comes from a script that is laborious and redundant. The film’s two hour running time actually defuses the effectiveness of the social commentary (I was able to create an hour and twenty minutes version of for my students, if only I was an editor during the Greatest Generation). In a film about the rejection of fascism, the depiction of Benito Mussolini (Jack Oakie playing Benzino Napolini) as an Italian American goomba doesn’t quite gel. Chaplin’s final speech, when the barber is mistaken for Hynkel and must speak to the masses, is full of great sentiments about equality and peace. The trouble is it is also full of a great deal of awkward phrasing and repetitions.
This film still largely works as a comedy (it had modern day “urban” youths howling), as a warning against totalitarianism, and as an important piece of cinematic history. All would be well served to (re)visit it.