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Customer Reviews of The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition)

Chaplin at His Best
After avoiding talking films for almost a decade, legendary director, writer, producer, and actor Charlie Chaplin decided to finally take the plunge with this film. He didn't let anybody down. "The Great Dictator" is far and away Chaplin's best film. He gets to be the little tramp once again, now in the form of a kind Jewish barber, and make us laugh. However, as Adenoid Hynkel, the barbaric, Hitlerish dictator of Tomania, Chaplin provides us with amazing social commentary on a world that is rapidly forgeting love and kindness. That Chaplin can be so dramatic and so funny at the same time, while still being tasteful, is one of the things that make him such a genius. Of coarse, Chaplin is not the only person in the film. His real life wife, Paulette Goddard, is quite commendable as Hannah, and Jack Oakie is a riot as Benzini Nappoloni, the dictator of Bacteria. The movie ends with the Jewish barber making a speach on behalf of tolerence and understanding in a world gone mad. It's a moving and dramatic ending to one of the greatest movies ever made.

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Chaplin's first talkie and the last Tramp film
The Great Dictator is the first Charlie Chaplin movie I have seen and it is the one that I had been looking forward to the most. This was the fist all-talking movie that Charlie Chaplin made and it was the last appearance of Chaplin's famous character: The Tramp. This movie is filmed to the brim with a serious social and political message and satire.

Charlie Chaplin plays two roles. The first role is a dictator named Adenoid Hynkel. Hynkel is the dictator of Tomania. Tomania is a nation that is a mirror image of Nazi Germany and Hynkel is very obviously Hitler. Hynkel and Tomania are persecuting the Tomanian Jews. The other role Chaplin plays is a Jewish barber, a war hero just returning home after the first World War after being in a hospital for nearly a decade. He doesn't know what had happened or why people are afraid of the Tomanian Stormtroopers. The barber also happens to look identical to Hynkel. Paulette Goddard (Chaplin's real life wife at the time) plays the love interest for the barber. Jack Oake plays Benzino Napaloni (a spoof on Mussolini), the Dictator of Bacteria.

The Jewish Barber returns home years later and finds that he now lives in a Jewish ghetto. Since he doesn't quite know what is going on he resists the efforts of the Nazis to label his shop a Jewish shop and also directly resists the Nazi soldiers by bumbling his way through a fight sequence that could only be done by Chaplin. At the same time, Hynkel is consolidating his power by giving speeches that sound spot on like Hitler...only the German/Tomanian words are clearly nonsense. The crackdown on the Jews continues and the Barber meets his love interest. We see the famous scene where Hynkel, in his dreams of world domination, has a little dance routing with a large inflatable globe. By the end there is a mistake in identity and the Barber is able to give a strong speech in favor of democracy. The entire movie is a satire of Hitler and the Nazi era in Germany and helps show how stupid the Nazi position really was. Remember this film was released in 1940 (though conceived in the mid 30's) and we did not quite know the extent of the Nazi brutality.

I will admit that this film did not quite live up to my unreasonable expectations, but this was an enjoyable film. From what I know, this is not quite vintage Tramp (for that, Modern Times is probably the answer) but is a classic and a defining picture in the career of Charlie Chaplin.

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Serio-comic masterpiece---Hitler saw this one twice!
This film is an excellent piece of anti-axis propaganda in the guise of a hilarious satire of totalitarianism. Chaplin portays two characters who's resemblance to one another is merely coincidental. One is a Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania with a jewish name, the other a Jewish barber with impeccable instincts for sussing out trouble. Overall, "The Great Dictator" attempts to demonstrate the idiocy of war. By turning the key players into buffoons, it portays the war machine as a circus. This film is much more than a lampoon of the Nazis, however. The silliest characature of all is of Benito Mussolini. Jack Oakie's portrayal of the Dictator of Bacteria, Benzino Napaloni, is the highlight of the film. He's like a stereotype of one of those "larger-than-life" tourists who bluster with absolute authority wherever he goes. It is really hard not to picture him in the loudest hawaiian shirt know to man. It is really obscenely funny. The interaction between the two dictators provides the most sustained lunacy in the film. Their attempts to one-up one another are just brilliant.

"The Great Dictator" does have an extremely serious side. There is an attempt to portray the plight of the displaced Jews with care and much pathos. It works, more or less. The Jewish Ghetto is given enough attention that the viewer develops a connection with them as they attempt to get on with their lives. Maurice Moscovitch as Mr. Jaeckel is particularly effective. Paulette Goddard plays Hannah as a rather dim, dreamy stumblebum. She's cute, but occasionally annoying. Sometimes, it feels like Chaplin has transported Hannah back to the Wizard of Oz--she speaks in that same half-whimpering, dreamy manner as Judy Garland's Dorothy.

Finally, this film certainly transcends any single political agenda. The only agenda one can associate with it is the aim to bring laughter to a world torn asunder by the vagaries of milatary posturings. It seems telling (to me, at least), that Adolf Hitler viewed this film twice. I have always been curious as to what his thoughts were on this total classic send-up of the great men of the Blood-Axis in their own time. Perhaps by the end of the first viewing, he perceived that Mussolini got the worst of it. Then he watched it again--this time with pleasure. If you can't laugh at yourself...