Looking Back at Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator
As a bit of a change up today, we decided to take a step back from our usual nerdy topics & look back at a revolutionary piece of cinematic history: The Great Dictator. Charlie Chaplin was one of the original innovators in the movie industry (even before there was much of an industry to speak of). His ideas for adding more cohesive story structure and longer length storytelling to movies back when a few minutes of anything on screen was considered enthralling gave rise to a whole new perspective in cinema. Coming from a vaudevillian background, he brought that fast witted sense of humor & comedic timing to his earlier work & laid the foundation for future entertainers like Buster Keaton & The Marx Brothers, eventually leading to actors like Jerry Lewis & John Belushi all taking center stage in the entertainment industry.
However, 80 years ago, Charlie Chaplin created a movie that diverted from his traditional comedic roots to say something political for the first time in his career. This movie was ambitious, not only because it was his first movie that would include recorded dialog, but also because the way he presented his message was very much against the publicly accepted norm at the time. It was bold & unapologetic in his outright denouncement of Hitler & authoritarianism in all its forms. However, it debuted as a critical & public failure, & even resulted in a long time vendetta from J. Edgar Hoover for what was wrongfully perceived as Communistic ideologies & associations (though to be fair, that was Hoover’s perspective on half of Hollywood at the time). This vendetta even got Charlie banned from the US in 1952.
Eventually, the public took another look at the film & realized that it was, in fact, a true cinematic masterpiece. It has since been added to the Criterion Collection & was selected to be preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1997 as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. While it may be a tall order, we have decided to use The Great Dictator’s 80th Anniversary (technically, it was last Thursday) to give our thoughts on the movie itself & our views on its place in cinematic history.