Film That Satirize Nazism And Hitler

Rating: 10/10 (27 February 2012)

The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin.Like most Chaplin films, he wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead. Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film.More importantly, it was the first major feature film to bitterly satirize Nazism and Adolf Hitler.
With this pithy opening title, Chaplin begins his first all-talking feature film, The Great Dictator. During World War I, a Jewish barber in the army of Tomania saves the life of high-ranking officer Schultz. While Schultz survives the conflict unscathed, the barber is stricken with amnesia and bundled off to a hospital. Twenty years pass: Tomania has been taken over by dictator Adenoid Hynkel and his stooges Garbitsch and Herring. Hynkel despises all Jews and regularly wreaks havoc on the Tomanian Jewish ghetto, where feisty Hannah lives. Meanwhile, the little barber escapes from the hospital and instinctively heads back to his cobweb-laden ghetto barber shop. Unaware of Hynkel's policy towards Jews (in fact, he's unaware of Hynkel), the barber gets into a slapstick confrontation with a gang of Aryan storm troopers. He is rescued by his old friend Schultz, now one of Hynkel's most loyal officers. Thanks to Schultz's protection, the ghetto receives a brief respite from Hynkel's persecution. The barber sets up shop again, developing a warm platonic relationship with the lovely Hannah. But things take a sorry turn when Hynkel, angered that a Jewish banker has refused to finance his impending war with Austerlitz, begins bearing down again on the Ghetto. Near the end of the film, when the dictator is expected to make another one of his hate-filled, war-mongering speeches, the barber steps up to the microphones...and Charles Chaplin drops character and becomes "himself," delivering an impassioned plea for peace, tolerance, and humanity.
Like all major Chaplin works, The Great Dictator was a cheaply, but methodically, made film, a cardboard act of humanist defiance, and, thanks to its purity of purpose, the cheesier the jokes get, the harder they land.Aside from that,The first full-blown talkie from the biggest star of the silent era, complete with a message that he couldn't have sent more loudly or clearly.Finally,the film hasn't aged well, but in 1940 it was perceived to be original, bold and controversial due to its combination of slapstick satire of the German dictator.It is one of the best films ever made in cinema history.