This is what you get when you mix Charlie Chaplin, the Tramp, and a healthy dose of Hitler inspired Nazism.

Rating: 10/10 (18 August 2001)

Charlie Chaplin was still making silent films as late as 1936 because he began his career as a silent filmmaker and therefore that is where most of his talent seemed to lie. His tramp remains one of the most recognizable figures in cinematic history even almost 100 years after his introduction, but Chaplin knew at the time that it would probably be fatal to the character and possibly to his career if he were to give the tramp a voice. People just wouldn't be able to accept it, or at least it would just not sound right. However, in The Great Dictator, he seems to pull off this seemingly impossible feat very successfully.
Sure, it's true that he wasn't exactly the tramp in The Great Dictator, but the costume and the behavior was similar enough for them to be considered the same character. In this film, the tramp is a Jewish barber who lost his memory during battle in World War I, and therefore doesn't understand what's happening when he is later discriminated against by the Nazis. He later becomes confused with Hynkel, the Nazi leader who looks exactly like him. This misidentification does not happen until pretty late in the film, so it is the events that lead up to it that make up most of the comedy here.
It's pretty obvious that Hynkel is a thinly disguised parody of Adolf Hitler, which is fitting because Hitler copied the tramp's mustache as his own. Chaplin was always very sympathetic to the poor and underprivileged in his films, and he took the oppression of the Nazis as another chance to do that. He makes a hilarious mockery of Hitler while preserving just the right amount of respectability and authority in his character so that he remains credible. Hynkel is clearly a bumbler in the film, and it's great to see that Chaplin had the nerve to give Hitler a good slap back in 1940.

The Great Dictator has been criticized for the fairly extensive speech that ends the film, if only because it is so uncharacteristic of a Chaplin film, but that is unquestionably one of the most powerful scenes in the film. Chaplin spends the entire two hours making you laugh at the tragedy that is going on in Europe at the time, but at the end he gets serious and really makes sure that his message is felt powerfully. As was the case almost 50 years later in Life Is Beautiful, a story about the Nazi Holocaust is told in an entertaining and amusing way, but the powerful message does not lose any of its effectiveness because of that. Chaplin made dozens of hilarious films about uncomfortable subjects and topics, and The Great Dictator remains one of the best and most memorable, as well as one of the most important.