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with his female counterpart, is seeking man's minimum requirements and is frustrated in the search through the soulless and inhuman demands of bigger and better production; the submerging of the individual in the mass.
The Great Dictator (1940) released four years after Modern Times, was an inevitable sequel to the film in which he attacked and satirized a form of civilization which deprived mankind of its basic needs.
In 1918, in the weary last year of the first worldwar, Shoulder Arms set the very trenches rocking with laughter. Now, in the first year of the war against Fascism, Chaplin stripped the megalomaniacs of Germany and Italy of their delusion of grandeur and shrivelled them to Carlyle's "forked radishes" through the mockery of laughter.
Hugh Kingsmill, in an interesting portrait of Charlie Chaplin, symbol of the weary disillusioned Little Man of Western Europe, suffering from the social disintegration following the 1914-1918 war, draws the following parallel between Chaplin and Hitler — "What the Little Man of the 'Gold Rush' desired was money and women, what Hitler desired was power, these desires forming together the sum of what most men want from the world. Hitler, who was born in the same week of April, 1889, as Chaplin, was his complement, not his antithesis, the Napoleon of mass consciousness as Chaplin was its Byron."
There is something that excites the imagination in the thought of these two world famous men, born in the same month of the same year in similar poverty and obscurity, pursuing their parallel destinies from opposite aims, the one driven by hatred, the other by compassion, until, in their maturity and universal fame, Hitler exerted all his power to conquer the world; while Chaplin, having already conquered the world, destroyed, with the power of laughter, the pretensions of the other Little Man.
Chaplin had always been interested in the dictator mentality: and Sam Goldwyn said of him, "Chaplin loves power — as no one else whom I have ever seen loves it". There was in him a natural understanding upon which to base his acute and brilliant study of Adenoid Hynkel, the man in whom love of power derived from knowledge of lack of power and had become megalomania. "Hitler, to me, beneath that stern and foreboding appearance he gives in news reels and news photos, actually is a small, mean and petty neurasthenic. Mussolini suggests an entirely different character — loud, noisy, boastful, a peasant at heart." Here, in Chaplin's own words, is the genesis of Hynkel and Napaloni.
The comedy of the film is all contained in the part dealing with the dictators; its sentimentality and pathos are expressed in terms of