295 - The Great Dictator, United States, 1940. Dir. Charles Chaplin.
CHAPLIN TALKS!
Wait. Didn't Garbo talk ten years before?
It is 1940, and Chaplin is speaking in a movie for the first time. Garbo spoke for the first time in Anna Christie, which came out in 1930.
Even that was seven years after The Jazz Singer claimed to be the first talkie in 1923.
Using a technology technically available since 1900.
So many silent film stars lost their careers when sound came to the movies.
A few made the transition.
But how many continued to make silents? And flourished?
One.
Charlie Chaplin made most of his silent masterpieces after the use of sound was available to him.
And the public kept coming.
He probably could have continued to do so.
But now he has retired The Little Tramp character and has made a talking comedy. Starring in two roles.
As Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania.
And as a Jewish Barber.
Yes, Hynkel is patterned after Adolf Hitler. It is a parody. And Chaplin already has the toothbrush mustache! People have in fact speculated as to whether Hitler took his mustache from Chaplin early in his career as a way to make himself more popular. However, there is no evidence to suggest it. The current suggestion is that Hitler was ordered to trim his mustache during World War 1 in order for his gas mask to fit on him. (Yet if that were the case, would it not have been more widespread?)
Chaplin is making this parody in 1940, which today seems quite prescient. Yet he stated later that he would not have done so had he known the extent of the atrocities which the great dictator was committing.
The film stands between the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933) and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942).
It was well received in countries where it was allowed to play, and it made a difference in helping to save lives.
After the War it was better understood how courageous Chaplin had been.
* * * * *
--Spoiler--
Because the dictator and the barber look identical to one another, the plot will build up to a role reversal in which the dictator will ultimately be sent to a concentration camp and the barber will be asked to give a speech to a large audience, adjuring them to pursue democracy
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