The Great Dictator
Directed by: Charles Chaplin
Written by: Charles Chaplin
Starring: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard and Jack Oakie

While The Great Dictator may not be as iconic as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times or The Gold Rush, it’s certainly still a classic piece of filmmaking that demonstrates how a master of silent movies makes the transition into sync sound cinema. While not technically a part of the ‘Tramp’ series of films, Chaplin still manages to update and reuse his classic character, dropping him into a dark setting — the Jewish ghetto circa 1939 — not realizing just how dark the real life counterpart to this story was going to get in the coming years.

The film opens in battle during World War I as Charlie Chaplin (playing an unnamed Jewish barber turned soldier) bumbles his way through various tasks on the battlefield. It’s classic Chaplin that at first seems slightly off-putting thanks to his Nazi style uniform. After taking some time to acclimatize to the fact that he’s fighting on the side of the Germans — or at least Chaplin’s take on Germany, which he calls Tomainia — the comedy ensues as he makes use of some great set pieces revolving around some — at the time — modern warfare technology. The highlight is a great upside down plane sequence in which Chaplin, attempting to save an injured German soldier, finds his pocket watch and a canister of water seemingly defying gravity. After crashing said plane, the unnamed soldier is treated for his wounds and is discharged from the hospital. Several years later the country of Tomania is now ruled by a ruthless dictator named Adenoid Hynkel, also played by Chaplin. His opening speech is as impassioned and manic as the real life Adolf Hitler, yet made up entirely of a combination of gibberish and the occasional German word (sauerkraut and wienerschnitzel pop up more than once). It’s quite obvious that at some point in the film, our two main characters would end up trading places (a la Ivan Reitman’s ‘Dave’ (or possibly more appropriately, The Prince and the Pauper)).

The Great Dictator must be one of the first examples of comedy used as social/political commentary. Chaplin’s satirization of the rise of the Nazi party must have acted as inspiration for Kubrick’s dark comedic take on the cold war in Dr.Strangelove (which also shares a lead comedic actor playing multiple roles), and maybe even loosely contributed to the continual lampooning of political figures on Saturday Night Live. Like his other films, much of the physical comedy in The Great Dictator has aged quite well, drawing laughs based on clever sight gags and some brilliant choreography (the most obvious example being Hynkel’s graceful dances with his inflatable globe). I will say though that some of the written jokes, consisting of some goofy puns (here, Joseph Goebbels is known as Garbitsch, pronounced ‘garbage’) and a lambasting of the German language, have not aged as well and do occasionally dip into low brow territory. Still, The Great Dictator was clearly ahead of its time. So much so that it’s easy to forget that this film was shot during a time when the scope of the Nazi Party’s threat to Europe (and the world) was not yet fully known. Chaplin had even said that he couldn’t have made the film if he had known then how grave the situation was to become. Watching it now, there is definitely an eerie quality to the scenes in the ghetto, especially when presented in such a broad, comedic light.

For a film that’s 71 years old, The Great Dictator looks pretty great on blu ray. It’s not without its occasional blemishes, but that’s to be expected. Framed within its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the black and white photography is consistently sharp without any sign of heavy digital manipulation. There’s a slight natural film grain throughout which makes for a convincingly natural presentation that should please fans of blu ray’s capability of recreating the ‘film look’. The disc is full of some great supplemental materials, including a new audio commentary track by Chaplin experts Dan Kamin and Hooman Mehran. The disc also features the documentary ‘The Tramp and the Dictator’, which examines the parallels between Chaplin and Hitler. There’s also two new visual essays on Chaplin, a barber sequence from Sydney Chaplin’s 1921 film ‘King, Queen, Joker’, and a deleted barber scene from Chaplin’s 1919 film ‘Sunnyside’. Probably the coolest feature is Sydney Chaplin’s behind the scenes footage of the making of The Great Dictator, presented in full colour! It’s a great collection of extras for a classic film. — Jay C.

SCORE: