First Laughs And Last Laughs

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2013)

Charlie Chaplin's boldest film for its willingness to take on Adolf Hitler before nearly anyone else, "The Great Dictator" was also Chaplin taking on sound 11 years after everyone else. If it had to be the end of cinema's greatest Silent Clown, he did what he could to take down history's greatest monster in the process.
There are two reasons to like "The Great Dictator." One is that Chaplin was on the side of the angels, at no small risk given his target's ambitions. The other is he didn't forget to make it funny.
Essentially a Prince And The Pauper remake, "Dictator" presents Chaplin as both Adenoid Hynkel, the cruel if inept "Phooey" (a. k. a. "Führer") of Tomainia, and a Jewish World War I veteran, poignantly left unnamed as a nod to the Common Man, who only wants to work in peace at his barber shop. While Hynkel struggles with his two great passions, hating Jews and loving war, the barber finds love and a cause to believe in.
The comedy here can be categorized into the great and the good, with most of the former featuring Chaplin as Hynkel. He's simply much funnier here as the bad guy, whether playing it broad (jumping secretaries, delivering speeches in hate-choked gobbledegook) or subtle (after shooting dead a man who claims to have "perfected" a bullet-proof suit, Hynkel simply turns and walks away with a three-word critique: "Far from perfect.")
Hynkel is a character who solves Chaplin's legendary problem with sound, whether dressing down his blubbering subordinate Herring (Billy Gilbert) or struggling to keep his composure when fellow dictator Napaloni (Jack Oakie) rebuffs his attempts at intimidation. Told by his right-hand man Garbitsch (Henry Daniell) that the people are objecting to sawdust in the bread, he huffs: "What more do they want? It's from the finest lumber our mills can supply!"
The comedy around the barber gets more labored. Maybe it's because much of it turns on the oppression of the Jews, though Chaplin here is trying to establish them as underdogs and rooting interest. It's here the film becomes tricky, not because he is mocking the unmockable but because the characters we meet, including the Barber, are fairly bland and the humor patchy. There is some very funny material here, but excessive bits too where people get klonked with pans or splattered with whitewash. At least Chaplin avoided setting a pie fight in a starving ghetto.
The famous last scene is a great divider for many; in it Chaplin steps out of character to address us the audience about...what? The world needs more love and less hate, I guess. It's a philosophically strangled message, both anti-fascist and oddly pacifistic at a time when Hitler's legions were swallowing Europe, with Chaplin warning of "machine men with machine minds" as if he was still making "Modern Times" and punching the sky at times for lame effect.
To me it's a crass way to end a good comedy, if perhaps necessary given the stakes involved. Hitler was real, and calling him out for what he was had real value in terms of rallying those called upon to defeat him. If it doesn't transcend time as well as it could, "The Great Dictator" is still a fine comedy that delivers strong laughs and stronger historical resonances.