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Rating:
This film, openly political, should appeal to everyone, even those on the extreme right.
It tells the story of a Jewish barber who, after being wounded on the front of World War I, suffers from amnesia, and after years in the hospital returns to his town. Unaware of the political changes in the state of Tomania, led by the dictator Adenoid Hinkel, he bravely clashes with the grey shirts, falls for the sweet Hannah, and ultimately, much to his dismay, replaces the dictator Hinkel, to whom he bears a striking resemblance, delivering an impassioned and optimistic speech to the nation.
The Great Dictator is a harsh indictment of Nazism (it’s easy to recognize Hitler in Hinkel and Mussolini in Napaloni) played as a surreal and grotesque farce. The currently screened restored version contains scenes with Napaloni’s plump wife (these scenes were cut to avoid offending Mrs. Mussolini, who was still alive in 1961 when the film was finally released in Italy).
The carefree and amused tone, a direct descendant of the whirlwind “Keystone Cops,” already made several people frown at the time. Even Chaplin himself would later say: “If I had known how horrible the reality of the concentration camps was, I would not have made The Great Dictator.”
The film is undeniably one of Chaplin’s best for its humanitarian value, for the corrosive satire of the dictator Hinkel (who often speaks in a funny gibberish, showing that Chaplin was starting to understand the potential of sound film), for its expressive and stylistic clarity (Griffith's lesson is still strong), and for the perfect balance between drama and comedy. A must-see film that teaches us to laugh at dictators because it can be a valid way to ridicule and fight them. Moreover, it inspired one of the masterpieces of recent years (the award-winning Life is Beautiful (1998) by Roberto Benigni, filled with references to Chaplin's film).
The Great Dictator has not aged at all. Of course, some gags are not completely successful, others are recycled from shorts from the '10s and '20s (many gags were already present in Shoulder Arms (1919)). Very often, the comedy relies entirely on pantomime, but as we already noted, with this film Chaplin's “surrender” to sound is definitive.
An interesting fact: for the "dance" sequence with the globe, which seems absolutely improvised, it actually took three days of work. Conversely, the controversial final speech, which seems written word for word, was filmed in a couple of hours and was improvised by Charlie Chaplin.
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