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.
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