The Other Guy With That Mustache

Modern audiences spoiled by more sophisticated anti-fascist fare like ‘Schindler’ and ‘The Producers,’ may be disappointed by Chaplin’s groundbreaking, but flawed, ‘Great Dictator.’

Charlie Chaplin, seen here as Adenoid Hynkel, his parody of Hitler, took a risk by making “The Great Dictator” (1940).

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

Charlie Chaplin had gone missing. Since his 1936 film “Modern Times,” this British expat who had become one of America’s richest men and its cause célèbre, had not made a film in nearly five years. The press only occasionally caught wind of his high-profile hobnobbing — a meeting with Churchill one year, with Gandhi, Brecht and Nijinksy the next.

But by the decade’s end rumors were circulating that Chaplin was at work on a new film, a parody of Hitler. This of course only cast greater doubt on its truth. Chaplin, the charming little Tramp? As Hitler, the egoistic maniac? Couldn’t be. And certainly not in 1940, with America staunchly isolationist, Hollywood nixing films with even the slightest political bent and Father Coughlin

dominating large swaths of America’s airwaves.

Chaplin wasn’t deterred, and “The Great Dictator” had its debut on Oct. 15, 1940. It will be re-screened in a brand-new 35-mm print at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday, where audiences will get another chance to consider the sheer audacity of this work. “No picture ever made has promised more momentous consequences,” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his original Oct. 16 review. “And the happy report this morning is that it comes off magnificently.”

“The Great Dictator” would become the most successful film in Chaplin’s career. And almost seven decades later, the film’s significance only seems to mount. Chaplin not only risked his reputation for this film, he risked America’s, too. He was the first modern celebrity to use his fame to champion a then-contentious cause. Even bolder, he did it by playing Hitler as a gay and a fool, inept with women and seduced by power and the men who gave it to him.

Just as important, Chaplin made a clarion call against the destruction of European Jewry at a time when neither the U.S. government, the leaders of the American Jewish community nor indeed almost anyone else would. “As a moral act [‘The Great Dictator’] is probably unsurpassed in American film history,” writes Richard Schickel, a prominent film critic and maker of the 2003 documentary “Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin.”

Viewed today, the film’s perfunctory plot may seem stale. The movie opens with an unnamed Jewish soldier from the fictional Tomainia (a mock Germany), saving a fellow soldier named Schultz during the First World War. But the Jewish soldier, played by Chaplin, suffers a head injury that leaves him in a coma for 20 years. When he wakes up, he returns as a barber to a nation transformed, now ruled by the rabble-rousing and maniacal dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, also played by Chaplin. Hynkel contemplates invading Osterlich (a stand-in for Austria and the Anchluss), while his sideman Garbitsch (pronounce it slowly, it’s funny; and cue Goebbels) tells him to divert attention by attacking the Jews.

“I think your comments about the Jews could have been more violent,” Garbitsch says to Chaplin’s Hynkel, who has just delivered a parodied Hitlerian speech heavy on guttural sounds and the occasional “sauerkraut,” “schnitzel” and “Juden” thrown in for good measure. “Perhaps you’re right,” Hynkel says. “There has been much quiet in the ghetto quite lately.” The film goes on to trace Hynkel’s harassment of the Jews, his wooing of the Gambino-ish Benzino Napaloni (Mussolini) and his final speech foiled by a duck-hunt gone awry.

In certain ways, the film has not aged well. Though a comedy, its straightforward narrative contains few interesting turns. (Plot was never Chaplin’s strength though, since he was accustomed to silent shorts in which stories were much simpler.) But the problem seems compounded by the many Hollywood films that followed this one, films built from the basic power corrupts theme of “The Great Dictator,” but which are substantially more complex. When Schultz, for instance, re-emerges as a Toimanian storm trooper commander and halts the raids by his fellow storm troopers against the Jews, one can’t help but think of Steven Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler.

Other criticisms have been raised, too: As Chaplin’s first talking picture, “The Great Dictator” happened late in the game — Hollywood had begun using speech in films nearly a decade earlier. Moreover, the dialogue, and most notably the film’s finale in which Chaplin delivers a platitudinous speech against war, is cloying, didactic and almost always cliché-ridden. To this, I’d add the rawness of the shifts between Chaplin’s comedic skits and the dramatic ghetto scenes. Chaplin tries to blend comedy with drama, but it feels nothing like an organic tragicomedy — just humor pitted roughly against despair.

Any aesthetic critique will always be dwarfed by the moral courage it took to make this film, to be sure. Yet the advantages Chaplin had in producing it should not go unmentioned. He was not shackled by Hollywood producers, many of them Jewish, who had cancelled on similarly anti-fascist films. As the co-founder of United Artists, which released most of his films, he answered to no one. He never became an American citizen either, so he felt little pressure to bow to the country’s official isolationist stance.
But many of his hard-won talents are no doubt on view in “The Great Dictator.” Most important is his keen eye for parody, often used to mock the claims dangled in front of him. People often said Chaplin was himself a bit like Hitler — born four days apart in 1889, both succumbed to outsized egos and both sported that silly moustache. To impersonate the Führer was to “reclaim his image from the new, repellent meaning of Hitler,” writes Kyp Harness, in his new book “The Art of Charlie Chaplin: A Film-by-Film Analysis” (McFarland, 2008).

The other notion Chaplin parodied was the erroneous claim that he was himself a Jew. At times Hitler himself leveled this charge, and now it often circulates among Jews with a sense of pride. Chaplin would use his trademark logic of parody — juxtaposing two images against one another so as to render one ridiculous — to dispel this. As Michael Wood, the literary scholar at Princeton, has written, Chaplin’s comedy stems from “a comedy of ideas even more than of character. His very screen personality is an idea, or clash of ideas.” And so too is the zest of his retort. As Chaplin answered to claims that he was a Jew: “I do not have that honor.” n

“The Great Dictator,” in a restored 35 mm print, will be screened once only at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday, Aug. 3, at 8 p.m. The theater is located on 32 Second Ave., at Second Street. (212) 505-5181. Tickets are $8, $6 for seniors and students.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization