The 10th greatest film of all time.

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2014)

What is it, where is it, how will it affect me? Fictional dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime. We start the top 10 countdown with one of the eldest of the collection of all-time greats, a later day work of a director we all know and love more often than not for his charismatic and vaudeville performances on the screen rather than his blueprinting off it. Along with all great directors throughout history, Chaplin's greatest work is disputed to a short fallen conclusion. Notable for his consistent recurrence of the themes of strife of the downtrodden and 'good triumphs over evil' fables, The Great Dictator is, at face value, no exception. But the film's rich tapestry holds so much more to it than that, elevating it to a stance of assuming easily the role of not only Chaplin's greatest but one of history's greatest. One has to admire the bravery of Chaplin to produce such a touching, topical and quite frankly worldly historic piece of propaganda entertainment in 1940 for his loyal subjects: the distressed, the downtrodden and fed up allied population. It's piece of work that, as it rumbles into life, seems to be a misfit and muddled fledgling of a picture, soon turns into the greatest comedy ever made. Yet, astonishingly, after it assumes this role, it proves ever more versatile to the dumbfounded and subdued audience, showing a climactic bout of emotional power and vigour in the form of Chaplin's Dictator's famous dictatorial speech. The skill to represent both the weak and the powerful with his interchangeable portrayal of two characters, who take turns in being the mature and immature of the pair, ending on the prior mentioned sublime and bittersweet monologue of conflicting internal ideals of the satirised Hitler as a largely solo effort, just goes to show the untouchable echelons of what performance and direction working in harmony in the right place at the right time can be like. The Great Dictator is often said to be a weaker film amongst its competitors of the 1940s and 1930s, but cometh the hour of darkness: cometh the document of courage and faith with both humanist and more serious intent.