![]() You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realize that this is precisely what a dictator wants. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet-at times almost literally-of alliances and petty tasks. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked "Ghetto," where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him. ![]() This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. He sees "Jew" written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there, and starts to wash it away. That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie's two central roles. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany-hence their hatred.Ĭhaplin was aware of all of this-and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat." Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler-even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movie stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air-this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home. The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France. The Great Dictator-Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler-began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II.
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