The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition)
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Features
• Black & White
• Dolby
• DVD-Video
• Original recording remastered
• Subtitled
• NTSC
In Theaters : 15 October, 1940
DVD Release : 01 July, 2003 |
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The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition) description
Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. (Strangely, the two men were born within four days of each other.) The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits one of his highest moments in the amazing sequence where he performs a dance of love with a large inflated globe of the world. Never has the hunger for world domination been more rhapsodically expressed. The slapstick is swift and sharp, but it was not enough for Chaplin. He ends the film with the barber's six-minute speech calling for peace and prophesying a hopeful future for troubled mankind. Some critics have always felt the monologue was out of place, but the lyricism and sheer humanity of it are still stirring. This was the last appearance of Chaplin's Little Tramp character, and not coincidentally it was his first all-talking picture. --Robert Horton |
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The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
A Brilliant Skewering of Hitler and Other Things...
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Charlie Chaplin's first sound film, "The Great Dictator" is a film that puts his genius on display for everyone to see. As a silent clown, Chaplin was unrivaled (arguably, some people say Buster Keaton was better) but few people could have expected him to be as good with a soundtrack. In, "The Great Dictator" (playing two roles) he brings the same amount of humor and poignancy he brought to his earlier films. Some people even say that this film is his masterpiece, although I still think "City Lights" was his best. Here Chaplin plays Adenoid Hynkel and a variation on his little Tramp character, this time playing a Jewish barber. The barber was in the war, but suffered a head injury and wound up in a hospital for many years suffering from amnesia. Once he's released, he finds his little town to be quite different from what it used to be. The dictator Hynkel has turned his town into the "ghetto" where all the Jews are met with disrespect and forced to paint the word "Jew" on their storefront windows. Since the barber doesn't know about this, he decides to fight back. He's almost arrested, but a man he saved in the war (who happens to be one of Hynkel's top generals) saves him. As usual, the barber also falls for the girl Hannah (Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's real wife at the time), a homely laundry maid. The movie warns us in the beginning: "The resemblance between the dictator and the barber is absolutely coincidental." That's not quite the case here and the final speech at the end is one of the best things Chaplin ever wrote. Besides skewering Adolph Hitler, Chaplin also managed to target Benito Mussolini (called Benzino Napaloni in the film) and the scenes between Hynkel and Napaloni are some of the funniest in the film. Playing two roles gave Chaplin the chance to do two things. Continue his reign as the king of silent comedy with the barber character and show his talent for spoken humor with the dictator character. Some of the funniest moments are his moments of slapstick however. Two of the scenes that stand out in my mind are when the barber throws a can of paint on a stormtrooper and another when he hops into a trunk in a moment of fright. Great scenes! In my opinion, however, "The Great Dictator" falls short of being a masterpiece. Despite having a few really good moments in the beginning, I felt it took a while to really get off the ground. There are some very memorable and very funny scenes in the movie though, but "City Lights" and "The Circus" (for example) were both better. Overall, "The Great Dictator" is a minor masterpiece by Chaplin and a film that proves that Chaplin was way ahead of his time.
GRADE: B |
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The Great Dictator (2 Disc Special Edition) dvd movie.