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.
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