Audient Classics: The Great Dictator

This is the eighth in my 2023 series Audient Classics, in which I'm rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but that I've only seen once.

For a couple months in a row, I've had a candidate for this series rise up into my consciousness of its own accord, and that's been the movie I watched. That didn't happen for August, so I just decided to pick a movie that was already in my Kanopy watchlist, that being Charlie Chaplin's 1940 Hitler spoof with a strident and righteous conclusion, The Great Dictator. 

The funny thing was, it was in German.

I don't know how Kanopy goes about sourcing the movies that are available to us to watch for free, but let's just say there's some eccentricity to it. 

At first I asked myself: "Was this film actually released in German at the time? I don't think Chaplin speaks German." But the fact that he does the Mel Brooks version of German, speaking German gibberish using some real German words and then just a bunch of nonsense that sounds German, in the way Brooks would do it a couple decades later, did make me question my own memory of this film, which I saw for the first time in 2015.

But then I noticed that the mouths weren't matching up, and then I realized definitively that this was a dubbed version of the film. 

I thought at first there might be a way to turn it off. I could turn on the English subtitles, and watched about five minutes of the film that way. But actually changing the spoken language was not an option.

For a moment I considered watching the whole movie this way. It would be appropriate, given that Chaplin made this movie to first lampoon fascism and then to shout it down in no uncertain terms with his closing speech. Germans scolded in their own language would be rich.

But then I decided that I don't want to watch a foreign film dubbed into English any more than I want to watch an English film dubbed into a foreign language. In either case it is a lesser version of the original art.

So I went to what has quickly become a go-to site for me, called Internet Archive.

If you are not familiar with this, it's an apparently free and legal site that has all sorts of old films saved on it, which you are apparently allowed to watch any time you want. I watched my last two films for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta this way, those being Judgment at Nuremberg and Mildred Pierce, after I couldn't find Nuremberg available for streaming or rental anywhere, and one of the others in the group made me aware of it. The Great Dictator made it 3-for-3.

In another example of the Kanopy-style catch-as-catch-can model, though, the Internet Archive version of The Great Dictator was hilarious in that it was listed as "FULL VHS: The Great Dictator (1940) [Playhouse Video] (1985)." So yes, I watched a VHS copy of Chaplin's classic, uploaded to the internet, telltale VCR screen distortions and all.

It was quaint and a bit hilarious, and better than watching the whole film in German.

Knowing the movie was more than two hours, I started in on it before dinner, but only got to watch about 15 minutes due to having to change sources. I still didn't finish until almost 1:30 in the morning, as the living room heat and my spot lying on the couch made me sleepy, and many short (long) naps ensued.

I think I might have liked the film a little bit less than the first time, but its strengths still shone through for me -- this time in a more episodic way. I think I remembered it having a bit more of a rigidity to its narrative structure the first time, though in reality it's more of a collection of bits and set pieces that come from Chaplin's always creative mind. These set pieces reflect his instincts for physical comedy, but also his burgeoning political awareness. I'm not going to assume Chaplin had never been political, and many of his films skewered the fat cats and the system. But in The Great Dictator he sets aside the narrative entirely to address the audience at the end, stepping outside of the character of Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, to address any fascists in the audience and inspire the rest of us to stand up to them. (Of course, it's actually Chaplin's Jewish barber character dressed as Hynkel, but the effect is the same.)

It occurred to me as I was watching this famous speech that this is what Spike Lee does at the end of his movies, and what he would have done if he were making movies 83 years ago. It may be an obvious takeaway that Lee would have taken inspiration from The Great Dictator, although a googling of relevant search terms does not return any results. I have to think it was fairly unusual at that time and that audiences would have been taken aback by it, pleasantly so I would hope. His call to tolerance and anti-fascism is simply stirring.

I think what makes it so stirring is that, even preceded by a few moments of the sort of melodrama that might appear in Chaplin's silent films, it was so tonally unexpected. Even moments before this speech, Chaplin is doing a bit about Hynkel sitting in a chair and breaking it, and then the remaining chairs getting shuffled at high speed among several potential sitters, including Jack Oakie's Benzino Napoloni. Scarcely a minute before this speech we are still laughing at this sort of thing, to the extent that it would be considered the film's primary mode.

I was also struck again by the guts it took to make this, and by that I don't mean the potential loss of the German box office. It's not that Hitler was really a risky target in that he had a chance to meaningfully retaliate, or that there were any reasonable percentage of the audience who would jump to his defense. It's more that it felt like a risk in terms of what audiences would find funny or what they felt Chaplin would be equipped to handle sensitively. Remember that this is well before the world learned of the murders of six million Jews in the concentration camps, but even then it might not have seemed possible that a film about Hitler could be funny, or that it would be the right mode to strike. 

I won't go through the individual set pieces that made me chuckle aloud again just as they did in 2015, with the exception of one that I had forgotten. The other character Chaplin plays, the Jewish barber in the ghetto, shaves a customer to the tune of Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5," his movements of the blade and dashes of shaving cream perfectly aligning to the pace of the song and the changing of instruments. It's a short master class in what Chaplin did best.

Okay, just four more months of this series, and nearly 90 more potential candidates that I originally identified in a Letterboxd list back at the start of the year. Maybe I'll need to start making more purposeful choices. Then again, there's nothing to keep me from continuing to rewatch these older films in 2024, just for my own pleasure ... of which they have been providing me quite a lot. 

Laughing at old movies

I made some rather controversial remarks in one of my film discussion forums recently.

They aren't the kind of controversial remarks that might get me in trouble. They're the kind of controversial remarks that might make me look stupid.

The gist of these remarks is: Old movies aren't funny.

Okay, there's a little more nuance in what I said than that. What I really said was something along the lines of "Seeing a movie during the era of its release gives you the best chance of finding that movie really funny."

The remarks were well-intentioned, made in response to the fact that someone in the forum had just seen Planes, Trains and Automobiles and not found it funny. I sympathized with him, as my own recent viewing of this movie made me realize that it had not held up particularly well and was in fact not quite as great as I had always thought it was.

However, whatever its objective merits, a movie can both be funny and remain funny to you, building off those initial positive feelings, if you saw it when it was new. Conversely, finally seeing a movie that everyone has been raving about for the last 25 years of your life carries a pretty high risk of letdown.

I believe the same topic arose some weeks earlier in the discussion of a different Steve Martin film, The Jerk, which he also didn't like and which I hadn't much liked either. The difference for me between Planes, Trains and Automobiles and The Jerk is that I saw the former when it first came out, and the latter in the past ten to 15 years. So, I definitely felt the truth of my own observation as it related to these two movies.

Of course, my comments were met with varying degrees of justified incredulity. One commenter in particular retorted that she always made sure to jump in her time machine before watching Chaplin and Keaton movies.

Touche. If you extended the logic of my argument, it means we're unlikely to find anything funny that wasn't made within our own lifetimes.

Although the actual wording of my observation may have been inelegant, I still believe the logic behind it. Another commenter who came to my defense, in a manner of speaking, observed that the biggest problem with older comedies has nothing to do with those movies themselves. It has to do with the fact that what was funny in them had probably been repeated ad infinitum by ensuing inferior comedies, which nonetheless got to bask in the borrowed glow because they got there first -- for most of us who had normal cinematic upbringings, we watched those new comedies before the older ones they're indebted to. Laughing relies on being surprised, and if the essential humor of a bit has been repeated, adjusted and deconstructed dozens of times since it first appeared, you just aren't as likely to laugh when you do eventually see the first appearance.

What this all brings us to is the wonderful and excellently timed exception to my rule.

You'd think borrowing The Great Dictator from the library might have been a direct response to the commenter who chided me about Keaton and Chaplin, but it was really just a coincidence. I'd been wanting to see Chaplin's first talkie for ages, understanding it to be a trenchant and biting satire of the Nazi regime in particular and dictatorships in general. I figured that if it were funny, it would be the kind of humor that produced knowing smiles rather than busted guts.

Well, I said surprise was a key to humor, and boy was I surprised by The Great Dictator.

I was laughing nearly from the first minute. The movie starts out in the first World War, with the character played by Chaplin (one of two) on a battlefield, engaged in all kinds of physical shenanigans involving canons, grenades, and finding himself marching on the wrong side of the battlefield after getting lost in the fog. And this stuff was driving me to hysterics, even though it has probably been copied more times than we can count in the 75 years since the movie's release. I practically couldn't contain myself when Chaplin is forced to help an injured pilot guide his plane home. The physical gags were funny, of course, but the thing that made me laugh the hardest was this exchange:

Schutz: "Can you fly a plane?"
Jewish barber: "I can certainly try!"

As though flying a plane were an activity that can be undertaken by any person with a plucky, can-do spirit.

Then Chaplin's second character -- the dictator, Hynkel -- appears, and gives a Hitler-like speech that's full of made-up German fricatives. It's something straight out of Mel Brooks, most of whose movies I've seen, meaning that in this case I could actually identify where I had seen homage paid to this film. And though I'm sure I found those moments funny in Brooks' films, it was nothing like watching Chaplin do it. I even felt myself feeling happy for Charlie Chaplin -- who has been dead for nearly 40 years and needs nothing from me -- because I knew that he had moved into the sound era with some reluctance, and it was cool to see that he was so much better at vocal performance than he probably thought he'd be.

I could go on about The Great Dictator, but I'll mention only two more moments that I found sublime: 1) Hynkel's dance with the inflated globe, which has laugh-out-loud moments but actually kind of humanizes the character in terms of his uncertainty about the very power he desires, and 2) the stirring final speech of the Jewish barber, which demands a better world in terms that entirely drop the film's previous commitment to tickling our funny bone.

Can't find any older movie funny? I knew I didn't really think that, but I'm glad The Great Dictator came along to remind me.