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November, 1940
11
Chaplin, and Jack Oakie as the rival dictators
must go back to Griffith's Intolerance for another motion picture that is so completely one man's personal expression of his attitude on something about whicli he feels deeply and passionately.
There is practically no plot : a Jewish barber looks so much like Hynkel (Hitler) that eventually he is mistaken for the dictator and finds himself in the dictator's shoes about to broadcast to the nation. The rest of the picture is the rambling, episodic sort of thing that a Chaplin picture has always been. There's the old Charley, hat, shoes, walk, with the old-time ragged gentility and gallantry, up against a world of mishap. (Ah, but here is a world of more than mishap, a world of colossal evil, and he can't just walk away from it, over the horizon, swinging his cane, to some new adventure). There are the same tumbledown settings, obviously just painted scenery. The same story-book girl, the object of his shy adoration. There are old gags, bobbing up like old friends.
with some new twist to them perhaps but bringing the same old laugh. All of the barber episodes are much as Charley has always been, slithering along on the fine edge between the funny and the sad, but always safely funny. From the prologue in the Old War (it might have been something out of Shoulder Anns), through the barbershop days when Hynkel forgot the Jews for a bit, till his escape from the prison camp in the uniform that made him mistaken for the Phooey, the picture might have been made before talk came to the films — it is, in truth, a lot like an early talkie.
But without talk Chaplin couldn't have been Hynkel. The gods in their wisdom made Chaplin hit upon a make-up from his earliest clays that destined him to be the inevitable parody of Hitler in appearance, but something even higher in the right ordering of things bestowed on him the gift to conceive and utter the astonishing, devastating speech that spurts from his lips when he is Hitler