Not So Great

Alan Vanneman has been writing occasional pieces, working his way through Charlie Chaplin's films. He's finally hit the talkies, The Great Dictator (1940) to be exact. Vanneman is good at explaining why--even if it was inevitable--the move to sound was a bad thing for Charlie.

Chaplin spent the second half of his career making five sound films--The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), A King In New York (1957) and, his only work in color, A Countess From Hong Kong (1967). There are those who try to make the case for these titles--especially the first two--but if Chaplin hadn't created silent comedy masterpieces, I have to believe his talkies would seem poorly made, not especially funny and hopelessly old-fashioned.

The Great Dictator was actually a huge hit. Chaplin's biggest. I think there are a number of factors. He was still a major star who didn't come out with movies that often. People wanted to hear him talk. People were in the mood for someone to take on Hitler. And, to be fair, there are a number of knockabout sequences in the film which aren't bad. But overall, the film (feeling very long at over two hours) is missing the magic of Chaplin's silents.

Vanneman explains what went wrong:

Chaplin's first obstacle was his age. In Modern Times, he was 45 looking 35. In The Great Dictator, he's 50 looking 50. [....] there's no hiding the fact that he's lost a step and gained twenty pounds.

What hurt Chaplin even more than the added weight and age was the fact that at last he was making a real talking film, where he would be moving in "real time" instead of the magical quick time of silent films. He would be subject to gravity now, just like the rest of us, and when you've got gravity grabbing your ass the last thing you need is an extra twenty pounds around the belly.

On top of all this, Chaplin doesn't really understand talkies. He's spent his life learning how to communicate through pantomime, but seems stymied by dialogue. Though that doesn't stop him from talking. And talking.

The film ends with a famous--or infamous--speech where he drops any pretense of comedy and harangues the audience with an Important Message. But it's always been an odd speech in that it attacks a lot of things (especially capitalism?) but seems to have trouble zeroing in on fascism. Vanneman has an answer:

Chaplin started putting the pieces of The Great Dictator together in early 1939, right after the Munich Pact, which gave Hitler the "right" to the "German" part of Czechoslovakia, during the era of the "Popular Front" — the Communist Party's term for a broad, left-wing alliance against fascism. But the film didn't actually get into production until September 1939, when Hitler and Stalin reached their notorious non-aggression pact, secretly agreeing to divide up Poland and virtually guaranteeing the start of World War II unless Britain and France acquiesced, which they did not. Communists around the world instantly switched from passionately anti-Nazi to passionately hostile to the capitalist war-mongers in the West, denouncing the alliances they once had desperately sought.

There's no telling what kind of speech Chaplin would have written for the final scenes of The Great Dictator if he had completed the picture in the Popular Front era. But the speech as it came out, well after the start of World War II, was wildly divided against itself — furiously anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler but desperately anti-war as well. Chaplin struggles wildly to paint a picture of his beloved socialist paradise where Jew and Gentile, Black and White will all live together in peace and plenty, but his roadmap is distressingly vague.