The Great Dictator (1940)

The Great Dictator
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Written by Charles Chaplin
USA/1940
Charles Chaplin Productions
Repeat viewing/Streaming on Hulu Plus
#144 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Field Marshal Herring: We’ve just discovered the most wonderful, the most marvelous poisinous gas. It will kill everybody.[/box]

This has moments of absolute genius although I have mixed feelings about the concluding speech.

A poor Jewish barber (Charlie Chaplin) serves in the trenches of WWI and after numerous scrapes serendipitously manages to save the life of “Tomanian” pilot Schultz (Reginald Gardiner).  He suffers amnesia from their crash and spends many years in the hospital, oblivious to the changes taking place on the outside.  Dictator Adenoid Hynkle (also Chaplin) has taken over the country and is persecuting the Jews in the ghetto.

When Chaplin returns home he falls in love with plucky Hannah (Paulette Godard) and bravely fights storm troopers.  For a while, he manages to escape punishment due to a chance meeting with Schulz.  Meanwhile, Hynkle plots to invade Austerlitz with advisors Herring and Garbitsch (Henry Daniell) but first he must negotiate with Bacterian dictator Napoloni (Jack Oakie).  Finally, the barber and Schultz barely escape with their lives but are finally saved due to the uncanny resemblance between barber and dictator.

Chaplin may be at his most graceful in this movie and the scene captured in the clip below is a wonder of balletic mime.  In fact, all the mostly silent bits are comic gems.  Jack Oakie manages to steal all the scenes he is in.  That chin is a perfect stand-in for Mussolini’s! I don’t like Chaplin much when he starts preaching, which he will now do more and more throughout his later work.  it is impossible to disagree with the sermon here but the sanctimonious tone is kind of a turn-off to me.

The Great Dictator was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Oakie), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Score (Meredith Wilson).

Clip – Hynkle and Globe