Chaplin's - The Great Dictator

From Netflix we rented the Great Dictator, which many writers think is one of Chaplin's greatest and his most commercially successful movie. This was done in 1940 so before the US entry into WWII. Chaplin's schtick is pretty clear, he tumbles together some German sounding phrases and a short moustache. But after the germanospeak is done a couple of times it is not that funny. Chaplin plays the dictator Aedinoid Hynkel. He also plays a barber, who in the end becomes confused with the dictator. There are a series of somewhat funny scenes when Hynkel meets Benito Napaloni (who is played by Jack Oakie) but Oakie does Oakie and so it is more like a skit. The rest of the movie is a jumble.

There is one good scene in the movie where Chaplin (Hynkel) picks up a ballon globe and dances with it (and in the end the balloon breaks) but if you add up all the great stuff in this movie that is unrepeated, there is only about 10 minutes of great movie in something that is more than two hours.

At the end the barber - who has since been transformed into the Hynkel character gives a speech about peace and brotherhood which seems quite out of character. I am not sure how long Chaplin took to make this movie but there seems to be a lot of ego involved and not much thought to tying the plot together or even to getting off the one good joke which is the accented speech.

What amazes me is how W.C. Fields thought about not just this movie but Chaplin. One of the demons that Fields lived with was Chaplin - he was always worried about how Chaplin was perceived. Clearly, some of Chaplin's best work was in the silent movies. Both Fields and Chaplin made silent flicks and they understood the comedic elements of silent movies. But Fields was able to master that genre and then make the move into sound movies. During the 1930s and 1940s Fields did a series of classic comedies - My Little Chickadee, Its a Gift, the Bank Dick, the Great Broadcast of 1938, Poppy, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, If I Had a Million, and then his role as Micawber in David Copperfield - made him a real contributor to film excellence. In comparison, Chaplin's movies after the silent phase were this one and a couple more that were entirely forgettable. So why would Fields be worried about "the little tramp?" It is confusing.

In Field's best work in the sound movies he is able to bring along the silent comedic sense but he also was able to bring along his gift for turning a phrase or a sneer. Chaplin, at least in this movie, seems weak by comparison.

Fields had a drinking problem that eventually took his life. For the last decade of his life he was basically in and out of hospitals and sanitariums (He died on Christmas day in 1946, surprisingly Chaplin also died on Christmas day in 1977). Chaplin had a political problem - he either grew more to the left or spoke out more and thus was moved out of the country. He eventually came back to receive a special Oscar. Fields was about 10 years older than Chaplin. Both had a sense of comedy. Fields had a lot of aphorisms but one of his greatest lines (and least quoted) was "The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh, but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water."