The Difference of Four Days in One Month in One Year

Rating: 10/10 (6 May 2007)

April 1889 is significant for two births that occurred within four days of each other. The births were of two men who would leave their marks, for better or worse, upon the 20th Century. On April 16, 1889 Charles Spencer Chaplin was born to poor parents in London, England. On April 20, 1889 Adolf Hitler was born to a minor bureaucrat and his wife in Austria-Hungary. The first truly great cinema clown and star and the most evil dictator of all time born four days apart - it does show the impersonal way fate acts, willy-nilly, in tossing this old globe and it's peoples about.
Chaplin and Hitler never met. They never had reason to meet. Hitler, although he liked movies, was not known to be enamored by comedians. In fact few of his intimates suggest he ever laughed that much. Chaplin had little use for the demon from Austria who seized Europe by the throat and nearly destroyed it, and who did destroy millions in his death camps. But by some ironies, such as their similar ages, their paths were bound to cross. The most supreme one was the mustache. Charlie had gotten there before Adolf (publicly, that is) with his toothbrush mustache. It made it look like a showdown for ownership of a trademark was destined between the two men. Only Oliver Hardy would sport a similar one to theirs in the same period, and Hardy's bulk made him hardly look like a Hitler clone.
Chaplin had read MEIN KAMPF, and knew the homicidal insanities of his contemporary. He made no mistakes about them - this man was pure evil. It helped Chaplin that he had grown up in the East End of London, heavily populated with Jews, and that his half-brother Syd was Jewish (as was his wife Paulette Goddard). Chaplin was fully aware of what this beast and his minions could do and would do. And yet he did miss the beat on the camps (more below on that).
Chaplin's first full talkie picks up with the conclusion of World War I. He is playing two roles, and the first is a Jewish Barber, who is a soldier in the Tomanian Army. The soldier saves the life of an officer, Captain Schultz (Reginald Gardiner, in a good performance), who was trying to deliver an important directive to the Tomanian commanders that could have won the war. But he fails to do it, so Tomania loses. The barber is knocked out and only emerges from his amnesia twenty years later to find Adenoid Hynkel the dictator of Tomania. Hynkel is also Chaplin. His first speech on screen is a wonderful spoof on those hideous eruptions of spite and malice from "Der Fuhrer" that newsreels showed in that period. When he clearly says in mock German that Democracy and Free Speech stink (he says "schtunk") the propagandist stooge translator uses euphemisms like "Democracy is fragrant!" to hide the curt dismissal involved in these comments. When Hynkel goes into a tirade about the Jews, the translator will only say "His excellency is commenting about the Jews!". Henry Daniell (as "Garbitsch" - a Goebbels type of adviser) is nonchalantly listening on the podium to all this. Later, when riding home with Hynkel, Garbitsch says, "I thought you didn't like the Jews?" to a surprised Hynkel.
So it goes throughout the film, with point by point demolition of everything hideous about the Nazis. But with fun. The swastika is reduced to a pair of exes (a "double cross"). The cult of the leader is spoofed by Hynkel having a schedule which allows him one five or six second pose for a sculptor and a painter (he switches the direction of his head for both). An inventor of a new bullet proof jacket offers a pistol to Hynkel to shoot him with to test it. Hynkel does just that, only to kill the man - which he just shrugs off.
It's a film full of delights, even with those horrendous shadows from the monster across the ocean in our minds. Only the handling of the concentration camps is less than desirable. Instead of real torture and horrible murder being shown, the camps are shown as places where the prisoners kick each other by forced marches in close order while goose stepping. Chaplin later said that had he known what horrors were in the camps he would not have made the film.
Paulette Goddard is the love interest, a spirited Jew who is shown fighting off two storm trooper thugs in one scene. Daniell is perfectly aloof as always, feeding his bosses's ego in that memorable floating balloon globe scene. Billy Gilbert is a Goering clone, Field Marshall Bismarck Herring, whose bulk is used in some scenes against Hynkel. Gardiner is Hynkel's aide, who eventually turns on him. And best is Jack Oakie, who is perfect as Napoleoni, the rival dictator (and Mussolini clone), who keeps besting Hynkel in oneupmanship (I suspect that Chaplin did not like Mussolini, but in 1939 - 1940 the Fascist leader looked more tolerable to most people, prior to his fully joining the war as Hitler's ally). THE GREAT DICTATOR was a wonderful comment by April 16 about April 20. It remains so to this day.