Like all my interests watching movies is also deeply rooted in a need to learn, understand, and appreciate art or the lack of it. And like all my interests this one too remembers its roots only now and then. When I do stay true to my intentions though I come across some beautiful movies, mostly old ones, often of the black and white era, when they were purely art, and a sincere media of mass mobilisation and education.
Charlie Chaplin is lovingly remembered the world over for brightening up a world mostly ravaged by the devastating wars and impoverished by whole scale depressions and destitution. In those simple yet impactful comedies, amidst tears of laughter what I have come to observe in his films is a thorough portrayal of society and its norms during his time. Acting the role of a hapless happy-go-lucky tramp in most of his ventures came so naturally to him that it makes one wonder if it was acting at all. Perhaps it wasn’t, perhaps he was in fact living his own life on the screen, telling us the story of a society that did not like to laugh at itself very much, one that needed a scapegoat like him to hammer home the point.
I happened to watch ‘The Great Dictator’ the other day. Having scoured ‘crosswords’ and other movie stores alike, around the city for some time, and been unable to lay my hands on this gem of a movie, I finally managed to borrow it from my aunt. I have distinct memories of having watched the movie once when I was really young. And I also remember rolling in laughter over it, in the good old days when watching doordarshan wasn’t a heresy. Well, so I wanted to watch it again, this time to understand it along with enjoying it. It was worth every moment of it. Here’s a few of my thoughts and interpretations, though not very intelligent in nature, heartfelt nevertheless.
Released in the Year 1940, at a time when America had still to enter the Second World War officially, it is a striking take on the madness that was the flavour of Hitler's quest to rule the world on the hypothetical argument of such an event being the God given right and duty of the Aryan race, exaggerated by him into a campaign not only to win military victory over the world but physically exterminate the supposed lesser, inferior races, chief amongst them being the Jews.
Chaplin plays dual characters in the film which begins with a hilarious scene depicting the first world war in which he is a Jewish barber serving as a private with the grand ‘Tomanian’ army, a reference to Adolf Hitler’s stint with the German war campaigns under Bismarck. A comic incident involving the much touted ‘Big Bertha’ gun that was to win Germany the war is only a premier to the numerous pot-shots that chaplin takes at Hitler and Mussolini
Chaplin portrays the helpless goofer to perfection, ending up marching with the enemy ranks after having lost his way or fumbling his way with and aircraft as he helps an injured Tomanian pilot into his aircraft and taxies out of the war front. The aircraft eventually crash lands and he ends up in a hospital where he spends the next 20 years in a state of amnesia. Meanwhile the ‘Tomania’ around him moves on. It is now headed by a ruthless dictator Adenoid Hynkel; Chaplin in his 2nd role in the film. A direct reference to Adolf Hitler down to the intonations of his fiery speeches, Chaplin cuts a hilarious figure, poking fun at the ‘mad-man’ at every turn. As the story goes, Chaplin spent days studying Hitler’s speeches to get the imitation perfect. The speech has one rolling over in laughter at the exaggeration and the overacting that has ‘Hynkel’ coughing and sputtering gibberish that, well sounds like German. His supposed German tirades throughout the movie are a complete riot. Even though the script more or less revolves around the dual roles played by Chaplin, two of ‘Hynkels’ top men
‘General Garbitsch’ modelled on ‘Joseph Goebbels’ and ‘Field Marshal Herring’ having a resemblance to ‘Herman Goering’, make timely appearances in scenes that has one gasping for breath with the sheer comedy of the dramatic situations that Chaplin presents. Later in the movie a character modelled on ‘Benito Mussolini’;
'Benzino Napaloni' as the ruler of the ‘Bacteria nation’ shares the screen with Hynkel. This boisterous imitation of the Italian Dictator bosses around a much perplexed ‘Hynkie’ as he is invited to Tomania to discuss an important power struggle over the border nation Osterlich (Austria); a take on an early altercation between Hitler and Mussolini over Austria that has almost been forgotten by modern history. Most of the movie is taken up by this issue. In the other role Chaplin returns to his barber shop from the hospital unaware of the turmoil that the world around him is in and happily ignorant of the persecution of the Jewish community by Hynkel’s storm troopers of the army of the Double Cross.
The movie switches back and forth between the Dictator and his dreams of world dominion and the simple barber and his budding romance with a Jewish washer-woman ‘Hanna’ living in the ghetto. ‘The Great Dictator’ has some classic scenes that have been etched into the history of Cinema, chief amongst them being ‘Hynkel’s’ dance with the globe, depicting his obsession with world conquest, a delightful scene of oneupmanship between him and Napolini in which they keep raising their seats in Hynkel’s palace barber shop to show superiority over one another, and the touching speech that the barber (having assumed Hynkel’s character after a rather comic sequence of mishaps) delivers to his troops after conquering Osterlich.
As the barber passionately implores Hynkel’s soldiers to start thinking for their own and refuse the rule of ‘Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts’, the climax makes for a stirring end to a story that strikes right into the heart. ‘The Great Dictator’ leaves you with memories, not just of the laughs that one had, but of characters and scenes that had a story to tell, of madness and the helplessness of the common man in controlling it, of egos and the damage that they can cause, of hatred and the wounds that they carve into our lives, of the gashes that take ages to heal. If any movie could have stirred a generation through laughter I am sure this would have. In a time when dying for a cause had assumed larger-than-life proportions, this is a story that calls men to pray to the religion of humanity, to erase the boundaries and look at each other in their naked personalities, unfettered by the identities of nationalities or race or religion.
In my opinion a must watch for any one tired of the mind less bullet riddled, gravity insulting, sexually outrageous cinema that has us aesthetically numbed and unreceptive.
