Roosevelt intervened, asking him to go ahead under any circumstance. Under criticism from conservative US political circles, Chaplin considered canceling the project until President Franklin D. It would be another year before the US would enter World War II, Hollywood still did business in Germany, and Jewish persons in the industry were concerned about reprisals. In creating the film, Chaplin met with considerable resistance. Another Chaplinesque blend of comedy, tragedy and humanity: "Modern Times" Image: Roy Export Company Establishment The Great Dictator melds wit, tragedy and humanity in a way that only Chaplin could. And it would be difficult, to paraphrase the moviemaker, to find another such person of the caliber of Hitler. The funniest thing in the world, explained Charlie Chaplin, is to make self-important persons in high positions look ridiculous. Parodying National Socialism with wit and depth, the movie's director and central character gives a devastatingly spot-on depiction of Hitler's mannerisms. Part of the effect, in Chaplin's first talkie, was a scathing parody of Hitler's rhetorical style and an over-the-top rendition of the German language itself, with exaggerated guttural sounds. Solidarity with Jews is one of the central messages in Chaplin's film. "His stance was that anyone denying that would play into the hands of anti-Semites," said British politician and filmmaker Ivor Montagu. That statement itself was fiction Chaplin was not Jewish, but he refused to make a public statement to that effect. His plots are those of a petty thief who repeatedly gets into conflict with the law." In "The Great Dictator" Adolf Hitler is now Adenoid Hynkel Image: AP The propaganda paper Der Stürmer noted in 1926: "Charlie Chaplin is a Jew. The Hitler-Chaplin connection went back years before the film, when the filmmaker was denounced by nationalist forces in Germany. His grocer later told Crotch that the person in question was a certain Herr Adolf Hitler, the leader of a tiny political fringe group. "In those days in Munich I lived in the Thiersh Strasse," recalled the author William Walter Crotch in the periodical New Statesman, "and I frequently noticed in the street a man who vaguely reminded me of a militant edition of Charles Chaplin, owing to his characteristic mustache and his bouncing way of walking." Hitler and Chaplin: The same mustacheīoth born in April 1889, Chaplin und Hitler did bear a physical resemblance - at least as concerns Chaplin's recurrent character, the Tramp. The film's production history was exhaustively documented in Paul Duncan's 2015 book The Charlie Chaplin Archives, showing how the filmmaker's seemingly effortless artistry was based on painstaking work. When The Great Dictator premiered in New York on October 15, 1940, World War II was raging in Europe.Ĭharlie Chaplin was one of the biggest stars in American cinema at the time, and many were surprised that he would choose such a timely and political subject matter for his first talking picture.
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