Farce.

Rating: 5/10 (4 December 2010)

Charlie has a dual identity. He looks like Hitler -- well, I'm going to use the real names of the satirized characters instead of Chaplin's rather silly ones. He also plays a Jewish barber just recovered from twenty years of amnesia. He returns to his little barber shop in the ghetto, not knowing that his Doppelganger has taken over the country and is persecuting the Jews. He develops an interest in the spunky and very pretty young Paulette Goddard. She's pretty highly evolved, compared to the other mousy residents. She wants everyone to stand up and fight against the Storm Troopers, even if their shops and fruit stands are destroyed. "What good is money?" she shouts. Good question. When Paulette Goddard died about fifteen years ago she left the mass of her estate to New York University.
I wish I could endorse this comic sermon without qualification but I can't. It's not as funny as it should be. There's little in the way of Chaplin's usual superb choreography. There's the scene in which he plays with a light-as-air balloon of the globe, but it doesn't compare to, say, the scene in the tilting cabin in "The Gold Rush." And there's a scene in which he shaves a customer, suiting the actions of the razor to the tune of one of the Hungarian Dances. Maybe that's where they got the idea for the Tom and Jerry cartoons that used the same gag.
Chaplin here deals with a genuine catastrophe -- the genocidal programs of the Nazis -- but doesn't slather the message with easy sentiment, thank God. Of course, in 1940, the world already knew of concentration camps but few had a very clear idea of the magnitude of the horrors. The German occupation of Poland was also satirized, in a far more sophisticated way, in Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be Or Not To Be." Chaplin's movie is, in a way, more courageous in bringing the problems of the Jews to center stage, not just the Poles. That candor probably didn't help him when he was kicked out of the US for "communist" leanings.
I'm trying to avoid the use of the term "old fashioned" but it's difficult. Paulette Goddard's downtrodden status is signaled by her wearing of nice clean rags and a simple, and rather becoming, smudge on one cheek. Make up in general is overdone. It's as if the audience were assumed to be locked into 1915, when such excesses were called for.
Chaplin probably should have quit after "Modern Times." His voice isn't really suited to sound movies and by this time, maybe, his inventiveness was flagging. How much brilliant stuff can one man put on the screen over the course of twenty-five years? This one is for kids, the kind who like The Three Stooges, but sadly the kids won't get many of the jokes.