Charlie Chaplin’s attack on fascism is funny, angry and sometimes too broad. His two performances make the loose construction worth forgiving, though 125 minutes gives some of the lesser jokes more room than they need.
Charlie Chaplin wants us to laugh at a dictator and remain conscious of the people who have to live under him. The Great Dictator largely manages it, and we recommend it warmly, with a warning about its uneven pace and occasional heavy hand. Its comedy depends on Chaplin’s two roles, Adenoid Hynkel and the Jewish barber, which give sharply different uses to the same performer’s physical precision. The barber gives us someone to care about beyond the target of the ridicule.
The First World War prologue gives the film a long approach to its main subject, and the barber’s amnesia supplies a useful reason for him to encounter fascism without understanding what has happened. It asks us to make that discovery with him. Chaplin’s screenplay is good at making political change something that happens to a person, though the succession of subsidiary episodes can obscure where the story is going. At 125 minutes, the film gives its weaker passages more patience than they deserve.
Hynkel’s gibberish speech is where the ridicule is most exact. Chaplin makes the delivery itself the joke: the voice demands obedience even when the words offer nothing to obey. We laughed, then felt uneasy about how little sense the speech needed to make. The performance catches something frightening about a leader whose audience is being asked to respond to force rather than meaning.
Karl Struss and Roland Totheroh’s cinematography serves that bodily comedy well. The theatrical staging gives us time to watch Chaplin’s movements, and the images are most effective when they let his behaviour supply the interest. There are stretches where the presentation feels stiff, but the formality suits Hynkel’s public performance and makes his ridiculousness easier to inspect. Much of the pleasure comes from watching how precisely Chaplin controls his bearing, especially when Hynkel is trying to command respect.
Willard Nico’s editing is surer with individual routines than with the whole story. The comic episodes have their own rhythm, but the film too often seems content to start another rather than move things along. The music by Chaplin and Meredith Willson matches the film’s open sentiment, sometimes providing more encouragement than the performances need. The emotional emphasis can become tiring when we already know whom we are meant to fear and whom we are meant to care about.
The difficulty is familiar in political satire: making a tyrant ridiculous can make him look less dangerous. Chaplin sometimes settles for a clown where a more cutting joke is needed. Yet treating dictatorship as something endured by a Jewish barber keeps the film from becoming merely a collection of impersonations. That second performance makes the cruelty harder to dismiss, even when the mockery is broad. See it for Chaplin’s physical comedy, and allow for a film that occasionally takes too long to make a point we have understood.
