Charles Chaplin (1940)
The World War I prologue to The Great Dictator includes a confrontation between a quartet of soldiers and an unexploded shell. Each soldier is a different rank. The instruction to inspect the shell’s fuse passes down the line until it reaches the lowliest of the four, a private played by Charlie Chaplin. As he trepidatiously approaches the object, it develops a malignant mind of its own and starts revolving at speed. The bewildered soldier runs round and round in circles to elude the shell, which keeps pointing menacingly in his direction. This – the shell’s movement, rather than Chaplin’s – made me smile. Getting on for two hours later, I smiled again, when a bowl of cream was confused with one of English mustard: the film’s Hitler-inspired title character, also played by the writer-director, puts a great dollop of mustard on his strawberries and tucks in. This time, it was Chaplin’s frantic, agonised physical reaction, in combination with the prolonged build-up to delivery of the gag, which I found humorous. Between and after these two bits my face didn’t crack.
In order to get through The Great Dictator, you have to keep reminding yourself that in 1940 this political satire was impassioned and daring propaganda, released at a time when America’s World War II position was still neutral, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. There’s no doubt the film, in this sense, was important – and making fun of Hitler, Mussolini et al one of the few options available for dealing with a sense of powerlessness in the face of their power. The names of Chaplin’s bigwig Nazi equivalents – Hitler is Adenoid Hynkel, Göring is Herring, Goebbels is Garbitsch (pronounced Garbage, of course, though it reads unfortunately like a conflation of Garbo and Lubitsch) – may have been considered silly by the film’s first audiences but that silliness would have had a charge. Perhaps the same goes for the cod German that Hynkel, dictator of the fictional country of Tomainia (the name inspired presumably by ptomaine), rattles off whenever he gets worked up. At this distance in time, though, The Great Dictator is hard to take either as comedy or when it tries to be seriously moving – and it’s the ‘classic’ physical comedy sequences, rather than verbal jokes that now seem daft and tame, which illustrate this.
The humble Great War soldier is, twenty years later, a barber in a Jewish ghetto. (Might Chaplin have made a stronger point by leaving it unclear whether the anonymous private became the unassuming Jewish barber or the physically identical fascist dictator?) He falls in love with his neighbour Hannah (Paulette Goddard), a laundry worker, who features in one of two perfectly unfunny sequences in the barber’s shop, as she sits in the chair and nearly gets a shave. The other is when the barber shaves a male customer to the rhythm of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance Number 5. In what, for many, is the highlight of the film, Hynkel smilingly imagines world domination as he contemplates a globe in his office. The globe is then revealed to be a balloon with which Chaplin juggles. The sequence makes its political point wittily but outstays its welcome. The Great Dictator improves somewhat once the Mussolini figure, Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, appears on the scene. Jack Oakie’s interpretation of Napaloni as a New York Italian-American blowhard is entertaining; the squabbling between him and Hynkel over which of them should invade the country of Osterlich enlivens Chaplin’s illustrations of the arbitrary and childishly egotistical sides to dictatorship, as well as giving the star someone to play off productively. There are good performances too from Henry Daniell as Garbitsch and the sad-faced Grace Hayle as Napaloni’s wife.
The globe-balloon scene introduces one of The Great Dictator’s most startling aspects: Chaplin’s use of Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude. As accompanying music in this scene, it seems an expression of fascist megalomania. In the climax to the film, the barber, forced into impersonating Hynkel, addresses a vast crowd in the capital of newly-invaded Osterlich and makes a speech, tentative at first but building to an ardent plea for brotherhood among all men. This rousing contradiction of Hynkel’s creed is also scored by Lohengrin, which makes Chaplin’s peroration all the more awkward to listen to. Hannah who, with her family, had fled to Osterlich only to be trapped there by the Tomainian invasion, hears the barber’s voice on the radio and his final words, addressed directly to her:
‘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.’
The closing shot of Hannah, as she turns her face to the sun, is lit to suggest this ‘glorious future’. She may be Jewish but the image, in conjunction with the swelling music, weirdly marries the iconography of Nazi visions of apotheosis to hyperbolic Hollywood happy ending[1].
18 December 2018
[1] In his 2002 book The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood, Lutz Koepnick noted that: ‘Chaplin’s dual use of Lohengrin points towards unsettling conjunctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Like [Theodor] 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’ (Wikipedia).
