The Joker and The Madman

Rating: 9/10 (31 December 2015)

Chaplin's films are like the ocean. The surface seems calm and unaltered, yet a great shift is stirring up underneath, the surface changing only when the powerful undercurrent is in full swing.
So it is that "The Great Dictator" (1940) is a part of this sea-change that finds Chaplin on a path to the apotheosis I'd place in "Limelight" (1952). No longer similarly spirited like Chaplin's earlier comedies, or the middle period of the late 1920s and 1930s, Chaplin is persistently moving toward a new kind of cinema already emerging in "Modern Times" (1935).
His transition to sound unquestionably had much to do with it. He had to let the Tramp go. Thus The Great Dictator marks a watershed in a filmography already brimming with turning points. I'd say this is where "late Chaplin" truly begins, Modern Times being a kind of transitory film. And as I've stated, this is not only a superficial transformation but a deeper development also in what he perceives as cinematic, funny and tragic. Surely Chaplin's films have always had that sinuously sad and dark undersong, commingled with the more apparently comical, as he was himself quick to point out,[1] yet it finds its maturity in this later period.
Seeing The Great Dictator after World War II and its aftermath is like reading James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) after almost a hundred years of literary criticism and analysis. It's so pregnant with cultural meaning(s) assigned to it that it's quite impossible to watch it not through the prism of history. But I think it's important to remember that this was filmed in the late 1930s, and as Chaplin would famously muse, he had no idea of the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime against the jews and others.
The film, then, stands in the anteroom to either history or fiction. Yet I can't help but see it as at its core as a kind of Chaplinesque fantasy, where the battle of good and evil is personified in the two doppelgängers.[2] The evil was not hard to find at all, yet neither was the good: it was the Tramp, of course, who, thanks to the advent of sound, is morphed into the Jewish barber.
As such, The Great Dictator is a superb achievement. Its place in not only film history but world history actually works in its favor, accentuating the comedy with the tragic and the tragic with the comic. It's a work of precision, intelligence and, characteristic of Chaplin's genius, deep wisdom. Has there ever been a filmmaker who has understood us better than him? I think it's immensely useful to approach The Great Dictator as a dyadic exploration. On story level, there's the good versus evil contradistinction; technically there's the constant discourse between the silent and sound eras, which presents itself not only visually or in sounds, but also in how sound and what is seen become an integral element of the story, a kind of continuation of City Lights. Chaplin has such extensive fun on Hitler's expense in the public monologues that I wonder whether, in Michael Wood's words, "he may in part be using speech to remind us of the beauties of silence."[3] In the story there's some drastic and some very subtle use of undercranking, as befits 1910s, the silent era, the film starts with.[4] We're extremely lucky, by the way, to have the Criterion Collection putting these out on Blu-ray. Everything they've released so far from Chaplin has been immaculate.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "The Gold Rush" (1925), for example, was inspired by the Donner party tragedy, as recounted by Chaplin in "Mr. Chaplin Answers His Critics," from The New York Times, 27 October, 1940. On page 18 in the booklet for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray.
[2] "Just think," Chaplin would say, "he's the madman, I'm the comic. But it could have been the other way around." In "My Father, Charlie Chaplin" by Charles Chaplin, Jr.
[3] Michael Wood, "The Joker and the Madman," on page 8 of the booklet for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray release.
[4] As pointed out by Dan Kamin and Hooman Mehran in the audio commentary for the Criterion Collection edition.