| Ed Dykhuizen |
The Great Dictator plays on glorious 35mm film at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 6th, through Tuesday, July 8th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
During the first half of the twentieth century, there was no bigger star than Charlie Chaplin. At a very young age he rose from English music halls to American comedy shorts. His defining character The Little Tramp debuted in only his second film, the 1914 Keystone Studios movie Kid Auto Races at Venice.
As was typical of Keystone comedies, The Little Tramp was a mischievous and sometimes downright cruel agent of chaos. The meteoric rise in popularity of The Little Tramp allowed Chaplin to gain more control over his projects, which he used to add more pathos and gentleness to the character. By 1915, Chaplin and The Little Tramp had become the first international film phenomenon.
The standard business practice for producing comedy shorts in the mid-1910s was to crank them out as quickly as possible. From February through December of 1914, Chaplin was in 36 movies, serving as writer/director for 20 of them. Film was an exciting and popular new entertainment, but almost no one considered it an art. Few people bothered to preserve copies of movies or even consider re-watching them. Film stock was produced with cheap and highly flammable materials. Once prints had circulated around the country, they would be melted down to make new film stock.
Charlie Chaplin had a very different perspective. He was a perfectionist who wanted to take time and effort to create both the funniest and most moving films possible. He used his string of hits to negotiate for more autonomy and the ability to make fewer, better films that would endure.
In 1918 Chaplin finished building his own studio. In 1919, he and fellow superstars Mary Pickford, D. W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks founded United Artists to handle distribution. Chaplin used his now-total artistic freedom to put The Little Tramp in his first feature-length film, the 1921 comedy-drama The Kid. It was another huge success, both commercially and critically.
By 1923, Chaplin had abandoned comedy shorts and focused entirely on carefully constructed features. Each release was a massive international event. His popularity was such that he could release a successful silent feature, City Lights, in 1931, more than a year after talkies had completely overtaken American cinema.
As the Great Depression deepened across the world in the mid-1930s, Chaplin developed a need to comment on contemporary political issues with his films. He had always focused on the struggles of the underclass; The Little Tramp’s hijinks were often motivated only by a plate of food or a place to sleep for the night. But Chaplin had never taken an overt political stance.
Modern Times (1936) was a more blatant criticism of the treatment of workers under capitalism. In what would be The Little Tramp’s last film, he is run through the wringer as a factory worker until he suffers a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he is arrested and jailed for being accidentally caught up in a communist demonstration. The Little Tramp finds prison to be preferable to struggling for survival in Depression-era America.
Modern Times garnered significant criticism over its political stance and earned disappointing box-office returns. Chaplin was also arousing anger for speaking publicly against the authoritarian conservative movements on the rise across the world.
Chaplin v. Hitler
Chaplin was especially vocal about the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. Before World War II began, this was far from a universally held belief among Americans. The United States was a center for the eugenics movement, which provided a foundation for Hitler’s philosophies. Eugenics holds that some people are genetically superior to others, and that those deemed inferior should be prevented from procreating. In the 1930s, more than 30 states had laws permitting compulsory sterilization as punishment for crimes. More than 64,000 Americans, mostly working-class people, people with disabilities, and women of color, were sterilized by court order from 1907 to 1963. (Information courtesy The Eugenics Archive.)
A few months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the Nazis founded the Friends of New Germany in the United States. The organization spurred a rise in anti-Semitic literature. After a House of Representatives investigation in 1934 crippled the organization, it was dissolved and replaced with the homegrown German American Bund. The Bund was openly pro-Nazi: creating fascist training camps, wearing Nazi insignia, and railing against Jewish people and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1939, the Bund held a rally of 20,000 members at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Hollywood’s general policy was to stay out of politics, lest it alienate a sector of the paying audience. It also did not want to spur Hitler into banning American films from the lucrative German market. Every major studio except Warner Brothers developed a partnership with Nazi Germany. Studios censored anything critical of Nazis from their films, and allowed Nazi-made shorts to be shown in American theaters.
In this environment, a feature film devoted to criticizing Nazis was unheard of. No studio would finance such a project. Charlie Chaplin, though, was financially independent. In his 1964 autobiography, he writes about his decision to make The Great Dictator (1940) by saying, “I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at.”1
Chaplin also professed in his autobiography that if he had known about the true brutality of the Holocaust, he would never have made a comedy involving Nazis. Still, The Great Dictator is hardly a gentle spoof. It features a serious, impassioned, five-minute speech from Chaplin, as himself, denouncing fascism and war.
Ever since Adolf Hitler had become an international figure, wags noted his similarities with Charlie Chaplin: They were born four days apart, were both born in poverty, and had the same mustache. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin capitalized on this by portraying the idiotic, insecure Adenoid Hynkel, an obvious parody of Hitler. Winking at the Nazis’ insistence that Chaplin was Jewish, he also played a heroic Jewish barber who switches places with Hynkel.
The Great Dictator proved to be Charles Chaplin’s biggest commercial success. Critics raved. It was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Writing, all of which would have gone to Chaplin himself. It looked as though he had gambled and won again.
War Changes (Almost) Everything
Many things changed after December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched American involvement in World War II. The German American Bund voluntarily dissolved, and Hollywood partnered with the federal government to make explicitly anti-fascist films.
Chaplin’s pre-war outspokenness proved admirably prescient to some, but not everyone. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had itched to prosecute Chaplin for his beliefs since the 1920s. Hoover got his chance with one of Chaplin’s many sex scandals.
In 1942, Chaplin had an affair with a woman named Joan Barry. Barry claimed she was carrying Chaplin’s child and filed a paternity suit. The FBI does not usually get involved in paternity cases, but Hoover had a special tool of oppression at his disposal: The Mann Act.
The Mann Act was enacted at the height of an early-1900s panic over sex trafficking. It made it a federal felony to transport “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The preposterously vague terms “debauchery” and “immoral purpose” made the Mann Act ideal for Hoover’s many campaigns against prominent left-wingers throughout his 48 years leading the FBI and an earlier, similar unit called the Bureau of Investigation. With it, he could prosecute any man who traveled across state lines with a woman he wasn’t married to.
The FBI indicted Chaplin for violating the Mann Act with Joan Barry. The charge carried a 23-year prison sentence. After a two-week trial in 1944, Chaplin was acquitted.
Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover was feeding negative information about Chaplin to right-leaning Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Charlie Chaplin may have remained a free man, but American public sentiment was turning against him.
During the war, Chaplin urged closer cooperation between the United States and its ally, the Soviet Union. After World War II ended and the anti-communist Red Scare began, this was cited as evidence that he was a communist. It was the only “evidence” available; the British spy organization MI6 tried but could not peg him as ever having joined a communist organization. Chaplin still became one of many filmmakers who were persecuted by post-war federal government because of their left-wing beliefs.
Chaplin also aroused suspicion because he had come out against Hitler earlier than most Americans had. Everyone remembered The Great Dictator of course, but there were other reasons that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) took an interest in him. According to Frank Miller’s book Censored Hollywood, HUAC subpoenaed him in part because he had supported anti-fascist organizations in the 1930s.2 HUAC chose not to hear his testimony, and Chaplin was never under threat of being included on the Hollywood blacklist that ended the careers of many film professionals. The publicity still got Chaplin labeled a “fellow traveler,” i.e. someone sympathetic to communism.
Chaplin’s 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux was his first financial failure. In it, he plays an anti-hero who woos rich women and then kills them for their money. The plot’s dark moral relativism provoked censors and audiences. Chaplin also gave himself lines decrying war and capitalism. The film added to his growing reputation as a dangerous subversive.
On September 18, 1952, Chaplin and his family left New York to premiere his latest film Limelight in London. The very next day, U.S. Attorney General James P. McGranery revoked his permit to re-enter the United States. To return to his adoptive country of 38 years, Chaplin would have to undergo an interview about his moral behavior and political views.
McGranery publicly stated that he had a strong case against Chaplin. An analysis of FBI files after Chaplin’s death revealed there was no real evidence against him. If he had tried to re-enter the United States, he would most likely have succeeded.3 He did not try; exhausted, demoralized, and despised by much of the American public, Charlie Chaplin spent the rest of his life in Europe.
You might expect that it would be a safe move for the world’s most famous filmmaker to make a movie ridiculing and denouncing Adolf Hitler in 1940. For Charlie Chaplin, it constituted a bold stand that would later contribute to his virtual exile from the United States. Perhaps even more than today, the mid-20th century epitomizes the old saw that the worst curse is “may you live in interesting times.”
Footnotes
1 Charlie Chaplin. My Autobiography. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 392.
2 Frank Miller. Censored Hollywood. Atlanta, Turner Publishing Inc., 1994, p. 125.
3 Charles J. Maland. Chaplin and American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 280-287.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon