In Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 comedy The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s first silent film, the renowned comedian and silent-film joymaker takes one of his biggest risks – making a film about Adolf Hitler, who at the time of the film’s release was one of the most hated and tyrannical figures alive. More than just the typical slapstick comedy, The Great Dictator sees Chaplin taking many different chances – unlike his previous film, Modern Times, this film would fully embrace the sound era, with nearly the entire film being filled with dialogue and fully-verbose characters. Even riskier than that, however, is the placement of a grandiose, inspiring speech at the end, in which Chaplin’s Jewish barber, having been mistaken for Hitler analogue Hynkel, calls for an era of reason and science to topple dictators and brutes like him. It is an intensely dramatic speech, one that potentially belies the satirical comedy of the nearly two hours that precede it. However, if one looks at The Great Dictator in greater detail, it is clear that Chaplin’s speech is prefaced (if in a slightly more comedic tone) by the film before it.
Chaplin’s criticism of Adolf Hitler comes most strongly in his characterization and portrayal of the Tomainian dictator Adenoid Hynkel. Hynkel is established early on as a childish, overwrought, overdramatic and abrasive dictatorial figure; his first scene features him giving his own speech (to parallel the barber’s speech in his place), wherein his pigeon-German has him looking foolish, saying words like ‘wiener schnitzel’ and ‘sauerkraut’ under heavy German intonations, and overall parodying the bombastic speaking style of Adolf Hitler. Chaplin takes great steps to make him look a fool, primarily through the use of Chaplin’s signature slapstick; Hynkel falls down stairs, falls off boats, is smothered by a cape, and more. All in all, Hynkel is obsessed with power, as evidenced by a scene wherein he joyously plays with a globe-balloon, Chaplin having Hynkel literally fantasize about holding the world in his hands. Hynkel is a childish character, Chaplin showcasing the immaturity and selfishness of Hynkel as a reason why dictators are bad (as he makes plain in his final speech).
The entirety of the Nazi regime is poked fun at in Chaplin’s film, with those in charge being made out to be terrible people who are averse to progress if it does not benefit just them. The logo of the Tomainian party is the “double cross,” both a visual reference to the Nazi swastika and a play on the duplicitous and self-interested nature of everyone involved with Hynkel’s party, Hynkel included. The silliness of making everyone shout “Hail Hynkel” is made clear by the film’s use of physical comedy, including Schultz’s half-attempt to give the salute, where he stops halfway through and says, “Oh, what am I saying?” By making light of the Nazi party and its ideals through these symbols, Chaplin lays the groundwork for his more serious takedown of them in his final speech.
Hynkel’s staff are equally lambasted for being short-sighted and stupid, with names like Garbitsch (a soundalike of garbage) and Herring. The typical toadies, they are just as greedy and opportunistic as Chaplin’s barber says in the end speech – they are “unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts” (Chaplin, 1940). They seem to have little (if any) regard for their fellow man, and seek only to hold on to their own power and prestige. Herring, in particular, is often adorned with an array of medals noting his military prowess (implied through his work subjugating the Jewish people); Hynkel rips them all off when he learns that Napaloni is invading Osterlich (Austria) before he is. Herring’s gleeful ignorance of the plight of other human beings is mined for comedy in one scene where he gleefully says, “We’ve just discovered the most wonderful, the most marvelous poisonous gas. It will kill everybody” (Chaplin, 1940). Garbitsch, meanwhile, is the propaganda director of Hynkel’s regime, and the mouthpiece from which the poisonous rhetoric Chaplin seeks to refute comes – Chaplin’s final speech is, if anything, a rebuttal to Garbitsch’s introduction to “Hynkel” immediately preceding it, where he talks about taking citizenship away from the Jews. Both Herring and Garbitsch are examples of the kinds of “machine men” that prop up dictators, the people whom Chaplin is denouncing in his speech.
Chaplin is also able to portray the intense and dramatic struggles of the Jewish people during World War II through his Tramp character, now altered into an unnamed Jewish barber who learns the true horrors of war. In the film’s prologue, the barber is in fact a soldier fighting for the Germans near the end of World War I; here, we see him blunder through a variety of war scenarios. The barber ends up wheeling himself around an AA gun until he falls over; he then nearly blows himself up with a grenade, blows his hat off with a .50 cal machine gun, and more. He even wanders for awhile along some Allied soldiers, who cannot tell he is German for awhile (playing again into Chaplin’s assertion that all men are equal and unified in purpose). All of these things show a man who is unprepared for the horrors of war, and whose plans in life are simple but admirable. He truly doesn’t “want to rule or conquer anyone,” but “should like to help everyone if possible” (Chaplin, 1940). The innocence and optimism of the barber provides a counterpoint to Hynkel’s callousness and childish indifference to others, as the former is the model Chaplin wants to hold up over people like Hynkel/Hitler.
The oppression of the Jews is depicted with subtle horror by Chaplin’s scenes in the ghetto. While these scenes are also comedic, there is a dramatic undertone to them, Chaplin underscoring the need for these conditions to change. The characters of Hannah, Mr. and Mrs. Jaeckel, Mr. Mann, Mr. Agar and others are simple, hardworking individuals, who simply want to live their lives in peace. Living in the ghetto, these people work as a community, help each other and share resources – they are the ideal Chaplin is referring to in his speech. These innocents are unfairly lambasted and oppressed by the stormtroopers, who seem just as indifferent to the suffering of the Jews as Hynkel is. When Chaplin’s barber cries, “Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder,” he is referring to these stormtroopers in the ghetto. While Chaplin gets many laughs out of the Jews besting them with frying pans and guile, the end of the speech shows his ultimate compassion for them, and his proposal that they work on the side of good.
The most important character to representing the innocence and hope of the Jews is Hannah, the barber’s love interest and the one most affected by both the Tomanian invasion and Chaplin’s final speech. Hannah, like the others in the ghetto, is a hardworking, assertive woman who is still feisty enough to, as Chaplin urges, “fight for a new world”; the audience first sees her rescuing the barber from stormtroopers by hitting them with a frying pan. She is frequently more courageous and level-headed than the other Jews in the ghetto, who suffer from some slight cowardice. When she and the barber share a moment looking out at the burning barbershop, Hannah becomes the avatar for Chaplin’s ideal person – the person who fights for life and liberty and tries to make a new world for herself. Chaplin’s barber is ostensibly saying this speech to Hannah, whose spirit is uplifted (as the audience’s is supposed to be) by the strength of the barber’s words; the final shot of the film, where she looks into the sunlight, shows that she is inspired by his speech and will work harder to secure the free world that Chaplin wants.
The Jewish barber’s friendship with Commander Schultz is a huge detail that contributes to Chaplin’s assertion in the final speech that men can be united, and that “in this world there's room for everyone” (Chaplin, 1940). During the WWI prologue, the barber works to help Schultz get into his plane and operate it; he works tirelessly to get the exhausted pilot to accomplish this mission, and Schultz remembers this enough to spare his life once they are reunited in the ghetto. (The use of a plane as a setting from which this friendship develops also plays into Chaplin’s later assertion that “the aeroplane[has] brought us closer together”(Chaplin, 1940)). Despite noting that he “thought [the barber was] an Aryan,” Schultz nonetheless considers the barber a friend. Schultz’s sympathies to the Jewish people get him ousted by Hynkel, leading him to hide in the ghetto along with the barber (whose friendship with him likely helped to inspire this more reasonable perspective). The friendship that develops and continues all through the rest of the film between Schultz and the barber is the ultimate case study for Chaplin’s statement that people are united and have the ability to cross racial and religious boundaries; through the film, they prove Chaplin’s mission statement.
In his speech, Chaplin speaks of the people who must fight and stand up to tyranny; he prefaces this wonderfully in the scene where the Jews are asked by Schultz to take on a suicide mission and must “draw straws” with a coin in one of their puddings. This scene helps to actualize both Schultz and Hannah’s characters, as well as reveal the Jewish people as being (understandably) reticent to fight. In this drawn-out silent comedy scene, each man nervously picks at and chews their pudding, fearing their next bite will reveal that they have the coin (and must sacrifice their lives). As each of them find a coin in their pudding, they react with fear and anxiety, some trying to swallow their coins, others sneaking their coin onto someone else’s plate. However, it is revealed that Hannah baked a coin into all of their puddings, as she believes that a suicide mission goes against what they are; this removes the burden of choice from them, and also unites all of them in a single purpose. In this way, Chaplin’s assertion that a “new world” is approaching “where men will rise about their hate, their greed, and brutality” is actualized here, as the Jews refrain from retaliation in favor of maintaining their principles.
Another aspect of the Hitler regime that is satirized deeply and darkly is Hitler’s relationship with Benito Mussolini, here represented by the buffoonish, blustering Napaloni. The audience is not shown Napaloni until late in the film, but he quickly asserts himself as being just like Hynkel – buffoonish, loud, arrogant and self-centered. He and Hynkel immediately clash and butt heads, as they humiliate and scold each other over an inability to come to an agreement over invading Osterlich. Hynkel and Napaloni alike attempt to use psychological warfare in order to intimidate the other. In the end, they reluctantly agree to a treaty, which Hynkel promptly betrays. The relationship between these two is diametrically opposed to the barber and Schultz, and shows that their desires for individual power cause them to not be able to get along and share the world, as Chaplin notes in his final speech.
It could be argued that Chaplin’s final speech at the end of The Great Dictator is a bit on-the-nose; the rest of the film is a comedy-drama that only lightly satirizes and sends up the oppression of the Jews and the hostile animosity of the Hitler regime, which leads to a huge tonal shift when the barber makes his speech. Given that he is also addressing the audience through the fourth wall (the shot is framed by Chaplin looking straight out at the audience), it is clear that he is talking to those who are watching the film, and this can come across as condescending and sanctimonious. However, given that all of the things he is talking about are prefaced in the film proper, this seems less like something shoehorned in than something gradually built up to by the events of the film. With this scene, The Great Dictator becomes a message movie, where the punchline comes from Chaplin’s earnest delivery of the message he has been alluding to this whole time. The lightness with which he opens the film lulls the audience into that false sense of security; he does this by making a joke about his portrayal of both Hynkel and the barber by noting that they are “purely coincidental” (also a joke on the expected disclaimer about Hynkel and Hitler). The second title card also dryly states that “Liberty took a nose dive, and Humanity was kicked around somewhat,” downplaying the horrors that he would talk about later in his speech.
In conclusion, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator features a serious, message-laden speech that, while a radical shift in tone for the movie, is adequately led up to by the film itself. Though the plot circumstances are somewhat convenient and far-fetched, the speech merely makes plain the messages that have been interwoven throughout the narrative of the film. Technology and progress, through the airplane and other devices, are shown as unifying forces, while the hateful and abrasive behavior of Hynkel, Napaloni and the stormtroopers segregate and oppress the kind, helpless Jews. These running gags underline Chaplin’s speech, as they show the way of the dictator as being selfish, short-sighted, and evil, while the lifestyles of the inclusive, giving and loving Jews are unfairly interrupted. These motifs and themes allow Chaplin’s speech to have context and dramatic weight, as the audience is shocked into paying attention to these very real atrocities that they have been laughing at this whole time. While Chaplin wants to entertain, he uses his humor here to highlight the danger of not taking such overgrown children (and enemies of free, progressive society) seriously.
Works Cited
Chaplin, Charles. (dir.) The Great Dictator. Perf. Charles Chaplin. United Artists, 1940. Film.
