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politicians were joined by the American industrialists, who maintained the system Chaplin derided and satirized in the film.
The outcry against him was now gathering force and momentum; and his own increasingly intransigent attitude added fuel to the fires raging around him. Chaplin the comedian was fast yielding place to Chaplin the humanist. And the latter was deeply concerned with the evils arising from man's inhumanity to man. His next film, The Great Dictator, released at the end of the first year of Europe's war against Fascism, in 1940, was a sequel to the film in which he condemned modern social conditions. All his life he had been furiously roused by anything that served to destroy individual force. Hitler was the incarnation of that destructive impulse. Chaplin, therefore, took all the well-known doctrines of dictatorship, and with sublime comedy, exposed their pretentiousness and their sham. So much ill-advised comment was made upon Chaplin's propagandist purposes in making the film that, as so often before, he was forced into a statement:
"Some people have suggested that I made this picture for propaganda purposes. This is far from the truth. I am not interested in propaganda as such — most propaganda is didactic and dull. I made The Great Dictator because I hate dictators and because I want people to laugh."
The Great Dictator was Chaplin's first talking film, and the last in which there is any real trace of the Charlie we knew in those far-away days when Hollywood hardly existed, and the little tramp had just begun his long pilgrimage, in the Keystone studios.
The years between the release of The Great Dictator (1940) and Chaplin's last film to date, Monsieur Verdoux in 1947, were filled with excitements of a dubious kind, that did little to disperse the suspicion and hostility with which Chaplin was regarded in America.
For the third time, his marriage ended in failure. This time it had lasted nine years, and for some of them had been wholly successful. The causes of its slow disintegration were multiple. Paulette Goddard was never as young in spirit as her two predecessors. She had a strong and demanding personality, which developed over the years of fame and wealth and continuous publicity along its own lines.
In her own way, she was as much of an individualist as Chaplin, and as headstrong. For his part, Chaplin had never been known to remain interested for very long in any woman who attracted him. After the rapturous beginning, the clash of personality began, until towards the end of 1941 it was clear that both husband and wife intended to end a marriage that had already ceased to be more than a fagade. The name of Burgess Meredith was already being linked