Cinema Sunday: The Great Dictator

 

Today's Cinema Sunday takes a look at  The Great Dictator, a 1940 satirical takedown of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis. Charlie Chaplin wrote the movie, produced it and directed it and wrote the music score AND acted in two different roles, a persecuted Jewish barber and the ruthless fascist dictator named Adenoid Hynkel whose busy persecuting him and all the Jews in the land.    

Set in the fictional country of Tomainia,  The Great Dictator recounts how Hynkel secures his grip on the nation, his venom filled speeches blaming others (namely the Jews) for all the woes of the Tomanians.  As one aide to Hynkel notes, as long as people are angry at the Jews, they may not notice their bellies are empty.   

Hynkel rants and raves but his rage and his hate obfuscates his insecurity, his ignorance and his incompetence. Sniveling sycophants scurry about to do Hynkel's unhinged bidding to appease their great dictator's desires and obsessions.

And if all of this sounds a lot like Donald Trump and his mewling underlings, well that occurred to me to while watching this film.

I was rather enjoying The Great Dictator when it made me think of Donald Trump so that's one strike against it.  

Anyway, there is the matter of the poor Jewish barber, still a bit addled by the amnesia he sustained in the war years ago. He's back in the old neighborhood where he just wants to resume his career as the village barber.

His mental state has left the barber a bit uninformed about the current political climate of his native Tomainia under the cruel dictatorship of one Adenoid Hynkel. 

Also the barber has the misfortune of bearing a striking similarity to one Adenoid Hynkel. Military forces harass the barber, thinking his similarity to their ruler is some kind of joke. Man, the dude just wants to cut hair. 

The barber gets sent to a concentration camp while Hynkel invades a neighboring country. It is an invasion that does not benefit the people of Tomainia but is designed to bolster the image of Hynkel as a bold and powerful man.

Events transpire where Hynkel and the barber are each mistakened for the other. Hynkel winds up imprisoned in place of the barber while the barber takes the place of Hynkel at a rally. The rally is a event designed to declare victory in the invasion where Hynkel is slated to deliver one of his rage filled diatribes. 

But it is the barber as Hynkel who approaches the microphone. Normally a shy and recalcitrant man, the barber is not one for public speaking. But the barber delivers an impassioned plea for everything Hynkel was not.  

Here is an excerpt of that speech: 

I’m sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.

We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.

In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich, and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.

The Great Dictator is often a very funny movie. Chaplin has a field day poking at the bloat buffoonery of this Adolph Hitler expy, his blithering faux German rants, his ineptitude, his insecurity.  

Chaplin has some gentle fun with the barber, a quite kind man who doesn't see himself as a fighter, as a political rebel. He just wants to run his barber shop and know the love of a good woman (the spirited and luminescent Paulette Goddard). 

But for all the fun Chaplin is having the expense of the so-called "great dictator", he never loses sight of the cruel fate of the country that Hynkel is crushing in his feckless pursuit of his own personal power and glory and of those that Hynkel would punish as being "other, different, dangerous".  

The Great Dictator is an astonishing film of wicked and incisive satire but also an unflinching eye on the truth of those would grasp the reigns of power using hate and rage. It is a movie that makes us laugh and teaches a very powerful lesson.

It's heartbreaking that after all these years, it is a lesson that still needs to be learned.