The tramp as dictator

By Sanjeev Verma

The first time I saw The Great Dictator was at the Film and Television Institute of India during a short-term film appreciation course that I was attending. Fascinated as I already was by the art of cinema, I had still to make my acquaintance with many masters of cinema, among them the likes of Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Andrezj Wajda, Stanley Kubrick, et al. It is difficult for a film to make a special impact when in the course of the same day you’ve experienced films like Antonioni’s The Red Desert and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.

Yet, that July evening in 1980 remains fresh in my mind. Yes, I was more than familiar with Charlie Chaplin’s cinema having laughed, and wept, through countless silent comedies shown on Indian television and also films like City Lights and Gold Rush. But this wasn’t the lovable tramp. This was the tramp in the guise of the Fuehrer and he talked. It took some time to get used to hearing the quintessential pantomime artist talk but it wasn’t long before I sat in the theatre enthralled by The Great Dictator watching the tramp play the dual roles of the dictator of Tomania and an amnesiac Jewish barber.

The ripples of laughter that greeted the virtuoso comic sequences—whether the barber shaving a gentleman to a radio broadcast of a Hungarian dance by Johannes Brahms, or the dictator doing a rhapsodic dance with a balloon-shaped globe and climbing the curtain in rage to the music of Richard Wagner—were familiar. What wasn’t familiar was the audience reaction near the end of the film, when the dictator is expected to make another one of his hate-filled speeches. But the barber, mistaken to be the dictator, steps up to the microphone and delivers an impassioned plea for peace, tolerance, and humanity.

There was much clucking of tongues and collective sighs in an audience that had earlier in the film enthusiastically lapped up Chaplin’s exaggerated impersonation of Hitler’s demagogic speech in gobbledygook German. Why did the closing speech—a cathartic climax if ever there was one—then upset the audience so much?

My subsequent research into the film revealed the extent to which Chaplin was reviled and lampooned for the speech by even his most ardent admirers. Having tried to make sense of all that has been written about The Great Dictator and in particular that six-minute speech, I am still as befuddled as I was 23 years ago. Much as I adored the tramp, the very first viewing of “The Great Dictator” turned it into my favourite Chaplin film and more than anything else in it I liked the end-of-the-film plea for peace and humanity. What problem could anyone have the speech?

Trite, naïve and overtly political are some of the things said about the speech. I have listened to the speech many times, transcribed, read and re-read the speech and tried to fathom what possibly could have upset so many people so much. I’ve singularly failed to find any naïveté, much less malice, in words like: “Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfil their promise, they never will. Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people…Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.”

Every time I read those words I find them ennobling. Those were days when ridiculing Hitler was a dreadful prospect. But embarking on a politically risky production, Chaplin cleverly used humour and satire to attack and ridicule Hitler’s tyranny. “I'm a clown,” he is reported to have said in a newspaper interview shortly before the film’s release, “and what can I do that is more effective than to laugh at these fellows that are putting humanity to the goose-step?”

With Chaplin the art of pantomime had reached its zenith. The coming of sound necessitated a painful transition for many directors. For 13 years, Chaplin had resisted sound. He had achieved a medium of ex-pression with close-ups and lighting in which sound wasn’t needed. When he did embrace sound for the first time it was to impale Hitler, the most loquacious merchant of misery. Hitler had unleashed such a reign of terror on people that it must have been a joy for a crowd to watch the dreaded Der Fuehrer being lampooned in The Great Dictator.

No wonder Milos Forman says,  “You can say that the allies liberated Europe physically, but with The Great Dictator, Chaplin liberated us spiritually.” The film cut the despotic Hitler down to size and showed how comedy could be a potent weapon of counter-propaganda and an excellent morale builder. Chaplin has said famously that it would not have been possible for him to make the film had he known the full extent of Hitler’s pogrom against Jews. Yet, given the limited information that was available to him, it took remarkable insight and courage to make a strongly anti-Nazi film.

It wouldn’t be half the film without the therapeutic ending in which Chaplin intones, “The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress: the hate of men will pass and dictators die and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. . . The soul of man has been given wings - and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope - into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up.”

In The Great Dictator Chaplin abandoned his tramp persona forever. He became unfunny to instill hope among people fearful of the megalomania of the Fuehrer. What could be wrong with that? That was my question then. And that is my question now.