Fatale Films: The Great Dictator [1940]

One moment.

I swear I'll start the review once I stop bawling my eyes out all over my laptop.
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Okay. I think I can do this now.

So, The Great Dictator: Charlie Chaplin's first talking picture and most commercially successful, made while World War II was going on. Also, according to Wikipedia, "At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Hitler, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis, whom he excoriates in the film as 'machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts'." So this was a really ballsy film and I can only assume that he managed to get away with so much by hiding behind the protective veil of comedy. Making an outright political movie at this time probably couldn't have happened. Also, this was the second Hitler parody movie to come out after a movie by the Three Stooges but I'm fairly sure this one is the more well known.

So if you don't know why I walked away from a comedy movie with tears in my eyes, you may not spend as much time on YouTube as other people.

But before I get to that, I want to talk about a different sad thought I had before I sat down to watch this again.

In my middle school there was a part of the eighth grade English curriculum that involved the reading of excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank and similarly a discussion on the Holocaust itself. Temporarily, English class became more like history class, I guess because of the poor planning of teaching geography in seventh grade social studies and American history in eighth. This went on for a few weeks, reading texts and watching the movie, and then the lesson was concluded with an assembly that all the eighth grade classes would attend where a Holocaust survivor would give a speech on his own experiences. I don't know who this man was, probably a resident of the town or a nearby place or a relative of a teacher, but I remembered them telling us that this was the last year he would be giving his speech as he was 78 at the time and getting too old to do it. I confirmed this with my brother who is four years behind me. He said that he had a Holocaust assembly but the speaker was a historian, not a survivor.

Five years later when I was in my freshman year of college it was announced that the activist, former professor, and author of Night, Elie Wiesel, would be giving his last series of Holocaust lectures. Every year since becoming a professor at my school and after he retired, he would give these lectures to the students. They were free but you had to get tickets because so many people wanted to attend. I couldn't go because I had class during all of them but it had reminded me of the assembly I went to in eighth grade. Twice, I had managed to be present for the last Holocaust speeches of survivors. It won't be long before there won't be any more speeches. There will always be accounts, especially with the technology we have now, but I have to admit, hearing someone speak about it really drives home the point that this wasn't that long ago. It wasn't some act committed when you can look back and say, "Well, we were barbarians then but we've evolved now." It was 70 years ago. You know someone older than that. Movies are more like 120 years old.

Anyway, I'll put on my funny hat now. It sings and changes colors.

So when you think of Charlie Chaplin playing a parody of Hitler you may have just been thinking of the toothbrush mustache but allow me to freak you out a little. Here's a picture of Hitler when he fought in World War I:

Not gonna lie. That resemblance is pretty freaky.

Also, as a note from my friend Zeyd who knows a thing or two about old movies and is very British, Chaplin apparently had a family life that closely resembled that of Adolf Hitler and this similar upbringing was not at all lost on him. This fact actually haunted him for most of his life as a sort of "what if" idea. Apparently one thing Chaplin did not have was the Jewish ancestry which there was no proof for, however, he was actually accused of having Jewish lineage a lot at the time and he chose not to refute it because he did not want to give fuel to the anti-Semites. Keeping that in mind one has to wonder if playing both a Hitler figure and a man who resembles the Hitler figure but chooses to do the right thing may have also functioned as some kind of psychological therapy for him.

Anyway, talking about this movie will probably be a giant case of bad radio for most of the time as Chaplin's humor is mostly physical and trying to describe it would kind of take all the comedy out of it. I won't spoil all the funny parts, I promise.

Immediately after the title card and credits there are two other cards, one that reads, "Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely co-incidental" and another that says, "This is a story of a period between two World Wars - an interim in which Insanity cut loose, Liberty took a nose drive, and Humanity was kicked around somewhat".

We start at World War 1 from the German side. . .

. . . and focus in on a bubbling buffoon who was assigned to pull the trigger on the BFG. Let's do a physics lesson here: little man + big gun. Does this sound like the best idea in the world?

Either way after falling over and accidentally joining the British ranks for a second before running away in terror, he encounters an injured officer and decides to fly him to safety.

He doesn't know how to fly planes.

It doesn't go well.

However, they crash from lack of fuel and the officer is okay. The man however has amnesia and is sent to the hospital. He is stuck there for twenty years, separated from the rest of the world.

Meanwhile ~~Adolf Hitler~~ Adenoid Hynkel takes over ~~Germany~~ Tomainia. He speaks in gibberish and tosses words like "wurst" into his speak where they don't belong.

Hey, doesn't he kind of look like . . . oh wait, nevermind.

Meanwhile, in a Jewish ghetto:

"Good morning, Mr. Jacobs!"

"What's good about it?"

"Well, conditions could be worse."

"If you think they could be worse, you have a great imagination."

Life sucks.

Asshole ~~German~~ Tomainian officers steal food from the grocers, smash windows, and generally at like drunk frat boys to people just minding their own business.

This is Hannah. She's the daughter or something of the bitter guy from two screenshots ago.

She doesn't take any crap from the officers. They pelt her with tomatoes.

The amnesiac soldier from World War I is actually a Jewish barber and he is finally released from the hospital so he returns to his shop finding things a little different.

Cutest invasion ever?

He cleaned up the paint on his window that he found when he returned home but it wasn't long before "Jew" was repainted on his shop.

He tried to clean it up again, not really sure why it was there in the first place, and a storm trooper kicks him in the ass. Literally.

This leads to lots of slapstick.

In the midst of the silliness, the barber meets Hannah who assisted him by whacking heads with a frying pan (~~must . . . resist . . . Hetalia . . . reference~~). She asks him what the hell he's been smoking to fight against them and he still has no idea what's going on.

"Strange. I always thought of you as an Aryan."

"Well, I'm a vegetarian."

The soldiers catch him and are going to hang him when Schultz, the officer he saved during the war shows up and thanks him, happy that he is still alive. He vows to protect him and his friends.

Meanwhile Hynkel does very important leader-y things like watching people test out ineffective safety devices, hitting on secretaries, and posing for artwork of himself in the three spare seconds he has.

He discusses with his Minister of War, Herring, and Minister of the Interior, Garbitsch (pronounced: gar-bage). He finds that in order to support his regime he needs to procure a loan from a Jewish financier so he temporarily relaxes his rules on the ghettos.

Having finally learned what is going on in the world, the barber returns back to his job where Hannah works cleaning up the shop.

Her father insists that he could make more money if he did women's hair as well and tells him to practice of Hannah while he leaves them to talk.

"We're very much alike. We're both absent-minded."

Truer words, my friend.

Psssst, you're doing it wrong.

"You should try it on yourself. If you were fixed up, you'd look handsome."

Hannah: Queen of the Backhanded Compliment.

Love happens.

Side-note: They were married in real life at this time.

This is what every world leader does in their spare time right? Evilly admire a globe? And then dance with it?

Herring: "We just discovered the most wonderful, most marvelous poisonous gas. It will kill everybody!"

Hynkel: "Later, later, later!"

Hynkel considers invading Austria . . . I mean Osterlich . . . and now that the Jewish financier has refused him, remember those ghetto rules?

Oh, life is grand!

Never mind.

The storm troopers burn down the barber's shop and the remaining citizens of the ghetto come up with a new plan with the help of Schultz who ran away to the ghetto after angering Hynkel with his opposition of the way he is treating Jews.

The main business owners gather to determine who will go on a suicide mission. Whoever chooses the cake with the coin in it will have to go.

All the cake have coins. Oops. New plan.

RUNAWAY!

Balls.

The barber is taken to a concentration camp.

Time for a little history lesson: Ghettos were made after the invasion of Poland and were really dangerous between 1940-1942 and many people died then from disease and starvation. The ghettos weren't really evacuated to concentration camps until 1942.

Concentration camps had been in place since the beginning of the Third Reich initially just as prisons with conditions that would have a 50% chance of killing you. It wasn't until after 1939 that people started being directly killed or tortured as laborers there.

Keep in mind that this movie A.) is a comedy and B.) was made in 1940 before there was much of an idea about these camps aside from them being prisons and maybe labor camps. Therefore, the depiction of concentration camps is a lot nicer than anything you are likely to see in any other movie about this topic.

Hannah and her family escape to Osterlich and she writes him hopeful letters.

Like I said, not the historical idea of concentration camps. He has his own bed and is mostly shown goose-stepping all day.

Hynkel shows his anger towards Herring by picking off his ridiculously numerous medals one by one. He's a bit nervous because they are having a guest over.

Imma stereotyp-a!

This is Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria which in no way resembles Italy.

Jeez, have you ever seen a more embarrassing representation of Italy and Germany?

Oh.

(~~I guess a Hetalia reference was unavoidable.~~)

The dinner party doesn't go well.

This is the result of English mustard, not LSD. It can be hard to tell the difference, I know.

However, after food fighting their way through it, Napaloni decides to support the invasion of Osterlich.

The barber gets out of the concentration camp with Schultz's help. Showing how might have been helpful, just saying.

At the same time, Hynkel goes to Osterlich on a fishing adventure and is arrested for stupidity or something without the authorities figuring out who he is.

Barber and Schultz end up walking into a Tomainian camp where they mistake him for Hynkel and tell him that it's time for him to give his speech on the conquering of Osterlich.