Movies You Should See: Charlie Chaplin Takes On Hitler (and Hollywood) in “The Great Dictator”

Movies You Should See is a new weekly series of essays covering movies that aren’t current but everyone should see if they are serious about seeing great films. Some of these films you likely heard of, some may have been before your time but can easily be found on physical media or streaming and some are more obscure than they deserve to be. Either way, these are films I feel you very much should see if you are serious about being a viewer of film as both an artform and an important medium. That doesn’t mean there won’t be films on here that aim to be nothing more than entertainment, but these films in this series aim to be great entertainment, and not just a time killer on a screen. With the COVID situation, my ability to go to the theaters cut short, I will start this series.

Charlie Chaplin belongs in that league of iconic cinematic geniuses that is a very small club, which includes Walt Disney, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton and Hayao Miyazaki. Chaplin is credited as directing 70 films, but only 9 of them are full length movies while the rest of them are shorts. It’s hard to pinpoint one Charlie Chaplin film to start, and I will likely return to him in future essays. To start, I like to bring up his 1940 classic “The Great Dictator”.

There is some backstory to Chaplin’s work here, as the film was originally conceived as a comedy about Napoleon, thus the title “The Great Dictator”. However, when Hitler started to come to power, and Chaplin picked up on the fact they had the same little moustache, he rewrote the script complete with using fake German words, to be about Hitler. When the film was brought to United Artists, of which he was a co-founder, they refused to finance it. This was despite Chaplin being the biggest star in the world at the time. They still had films released in Germany, and did not want to hurt their bottom line, so Chaplin ended up financing the entire film out of pocket. Hollywood, for the most part during production, wanted nothing to do with this film, until they saw it at the premiere and gave the film a standing ovation that went on for 10 minutes.

There is so much to admire about “The Great Dictator”. The scene that introduces Chaplin as the unnamed Hitler character is one of my favorite scenes in all of film. When he gets the blown up beach ball which is supposed to represent the world, and he throws it around, laughing and smiling. When it pops , he becomes frustrated. Then we are introduced to an unnamed barber, also played by Charlie Chaplin, and we get another interesting detail. While the name “Hilter” is never said out loud in the film, the barber comes across a fence with the word “JEW” painted on it. This shows he lives in the Jewish ghetto, and is Jewish. It’s unique, and ahead of its time in how multi-layered it is, that the word Jew is allowed to show up in this film, complete with an unsureness that the rest is Hilter and Germany or a fictional spoof of it.

With fascism on the rise today, “The Great Dictator” is an important film to watch. In the final speech, after not speaking for the entire film, and Chaplin’s little barber, being mixed up for the dictator, he gives a speech where he proclaims, with the most iconic lines in film history, “we think too much, and feel too little.” This is one of the gutsiest films ever made, and an unofficial finale to Chaplin’s original run of films, as the Jewish barber is the last time he ever played a character who resembled his famous character of The Little Tramp. This ended one of the most important runs in film history with one of the most socially relevant ones ever made.

Movies You Should See: Michael Moore Turns The American Dream On It's Head With "Roger And Me"

Movies You Should See is a new weekly series of essays covering movies that aren’t current but everyone should see if they are serious about seeing great films. Some of these films you likely heard of, some may have been before your time but can easily be found on physical media or streaming and some are more obscure than they deserve to be. Either way, these are films I feel you very much should see if you are serious about being a viewer of film as both an artform and an important medium. That doesn’t mean there won’t be films on here that aim to be nothing more than entertainment, but these films in this series aim to be great entertainment, and not just a time killer on a screen. With the COVID situation, my ability to go to the theaters cut short, I will start this series.

One of the categories the Oscars messes up every year, with the exception of a year or two, when they get it right, is Best Documentary. They didn’t nominate 1994’s “Hoop Dreams”, which in 2005, was named the greatest documentary ever made by a group of top documentary makers. On that list of 50 greatest documentaries ever made, they also didn’t nominate for an Oscar, #2 and #3. Errol Morris’s 1988 film “The Thin Blue Line” and Michael Moore’s 1989 film “Roger And Me” are those films. Despite coming in at # 3, which is still great out of a list of 50, if we were to make a list of the most influential and watchable of these documentaries,  “Roger and Me” would come in at #1 for simply how ground-breaking it was.

Michael Moore, in his first feature, throws everything against the wall, to tell the story of how GM, the biggest corporation in the world at that time, pulled their manufacturing plant from his hometown of Flint Michigan and the aftermath of that decision. In doing so, he makes a film that is  both entertaining and depressing, and even funny at times, with light moments despite the subject matter. Moore’s film is also enhanced by his narration, which is full of personal asides, quirky observations about his hometown and his dry humor.

The title of the film refers to Roger Smith, at the time, the CEO and president of General Motors, who made the decision to pull the factory out of Flint and move it to Mexico for cheaper labor. There are scenes in this film that are hard to watch, like a man killing himself in a street, a woman skinning a rabbit to sell as meat, and the indifference of rich people who hired the people of Flint to be human statues at their parties as jokes. The scene where Moore drives through a street with a car, filming a tracking shot of abandoned houses in Flint, with “Wouldn’t Be It Nice”, playing over it is one of the most famous and affecting scenes in documentary history. However, there’s also a ton of funny scenes, Bob Eubanks being a celebrity grand marshal at a local parade and making an anti-Semitic joke on camera, Michael Moore bringing a fruit basket to GM headquarters and being thrown out, and Moore getting a perm to help a women who signed up for Amway.

One of the voters of the poll of great documentaries, and the host of the special which aired on the defunt arts cable channel Trio at the time, Morgan Spurlock, himself a documentary maker in the Moore mold, admitted even though “Roger and Me” wasn’t number one, it is the most iconic film on the list and arguably in documentary history. What makes “Roger and Me” a great film too, is it’s revision of the narrative we receive about Ronald Reagan’s America, going so far to show a scene of Reagan literally standing in a pizzeria, campaigning on the idea that if they re-elect him, he’ll bring back the jobs. He never did. Moore’s films following this, follow what “Roger and Me” started, which is the flip side of the American dream, and no living filmmaker has done a better job documenting that.