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The Great Dictator (1940)
DVD (1 discs
)
Blu-ray (1 discs
)
Digital ✓
Genre: Comedy
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Sound: Mono
Academy Awards:
5 Nominations
Synopsis
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.
Cast
Charlie Chaplin
Paulette Goddard
Director
Charles Chaplin
Awards & Nominations
- Oscar Nominee: Best Actor In A Leading Role
- Oscar Nominee: Best Actor In A Supporting Role
- Oscar Nominee: Best Music, Original Music Score
- Oscar Nominee: Best Picture
- Oscar Nominee: Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Keywords
AFI Top 100 Funniest
Classics
Comedy
Technical Specifications
Audio Languages
English
Subtitle Languages
English
Special Features
- Audio commentary
- Deleted/extended scenes
- Interviews
- Trailers/TV spots
- Additional 1918 Sequence
- 1933 Adolf Hitler Newsreel
- Original Story Notes
- Drafts Of Scripts
- audio commentary by Charlie Chaplin historians Dan Kamin and Hooman Mehran
- The Tramp And The Dictator (2001), Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft's documentary paralleling the lives of Chaplin and Hitler
- Two new visual essays
- Color production footage shot by Chaplin's half-brother Sydney
- Barbershop sequence from Sydney Chaplin's 1921 film King, Queen, Joker
- Deleted barbershop sequence from Chaplin's 1919 film Sunnyside
- Rerelease trailer
- An essay by film critic Michael Wood