Number 108 on IMDb's Top 250
During the last days of the First World War, a clumsy soldier saves the life of devoted military pilot Schultz. Unfortunately, their flight from the advancing enemy ends in a severe crash with the clumsy soldier losing his memories. After quite some years in the hospital, the amnesia patient gets released and reopens his old barber shop in the Jewish ghetto. But times have changed in the country of Tomania: Dictator Adenoid Hynkel, who accidentally looks very similar to the barber, has laid his merciless grip on the country, and the Jewish people are discriminated against. One day, the barber gets in trouble and is brought before a commanding officer, who turns out to be his old comrade Schultz. So, the ghetto enjoys protection from Schultz as a gesture to the barber for saving his life. Meanwhile, Dictator Hynkel develops big plans, he wants to become Dictator of the whole world and needs a scapegoat for the public. Soon, Schultz is being arrested for being too Jewish-friendly, and all Jews except those who managed to flee are transported into Concentration Camps. Hynkel is planning to march into Osterlich to show off against Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria, who already has deployed his troops along the other border of the small country. Meanwhile, Schultz and the barber manage to escape, guised in military uniforms. As luck would have it, Schultz and the barber are picked up by Tomanian forces and the barber is mixed up with Hynkel himself. The small barber now gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to speak to the people of Osterlich and all of Tomania, who listen eagerly on the radio. Hilarity ensues.
Trivia: Charlie Chaplin got the idea for the movie when a friend noted that his screen persona and Adolf Hitler looked somewhat similar. Chaplin later learned they were both born within a week of each other, were roughly the same height and weight and both struggled in poverty until they reached great success in their respective fields. When Chaplin learned of Hitler's policies of racial oppression and nationalist aggression, he used their similarities as an inspiration to attack Hitler on film. Chaplin said that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he "could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity". According to documentaries on the making of the film, Chaplin began to feel more uncomfortable lampooning Adolf Hitler the more he heard of Hitler's actions in Europe. Ultimately, the invasion of France inspired Chaplin to change the ending of his film to include his famous speech.
This is a hard movie to figure out with the benefit of knowledge of what really happened. But if you realize that this movie was made in the first six months of the second World War an a full year before the "true death camps" were opened, it makes it a little easier to look at it as a great satirical movie. It lampoons the Hitler and the Nazis, while showing the residence of the Jewish Ghetto in a positve light. The scene where Chaplin plays with the inflated globe was one of his most famous, but I thought the very next scene where the barber shaves a man in time with Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 was better, in fact I think it is the second best barber scene I have ever seen, behind The Rabbit of Seville. The speech at the end was controversial and many said it was politically motivated, I agree. The speech was completly out of character for the quiet barber and seemed to be saying, "okay, now that you have watched this movie, here is what you should take away from this experience" and to me seemed to say that everybody should stand up against the Nazis and fight back, which is quite interesting considering that it was released in 1940 way before America was dragged into the war at the end of 1941.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment