New Picture

The Great Dictator (United Artists) is the story of a little, persecuted Jewish barber (Charlie Chaplin) living in a state ruled by a nasty dictator (also Charlie Chaplin) and how the two finally find their roles reversed. Mr. Chaplin put into it four infallible ingredients:

Slapstick he provided liberally--Chaplin the soldier of World War I firing an anti-aircraft gun in all heavenly and earthly directions; Chaplin the dictator who takes a huge mouthful of English mustard; Jack Oakie, the rival dictator, mugging and talking tough.

Satire in all its refinements and lack of refinement also went into the pot--crude take-offs on a dictator's pretensions and occupations, neat bits such as a radio commentator's translation of the dictator's oration of hate, one magnificent scene in which Dictator Chaplin lifts a globe of the world from a stand in his office and does a bubble dance, exquisite and grotesque.

Pathos, as good as any Chaplin put into The Kid, goes in too--the homely lives of the Jews in the Ghetto, the naive pleasures of the little barber's scrubgirl friend (Mr. Chaplin's Paulette Goddard).

Melodrama is also included, for the first time, by Scriptwriter Chaplin--storm troopers as brutal, a dictator as pathologically ruthless, as human sadism could desire.

If anyone does not know how these ingredients taste, let him whip a quart of the thickest cream, mix the best green salad he knows how, pour a tumblerful of creme de menthe. cook up a bowlful of spicy Hungarian goulash--then mix them all rapidly in a tureen and spend two hours trying to consume them all at once.

Chaplin's previous hits have been pearls of assorted humor strung on a thread of personality--the personality of an ineffectual, half pathetic, half grotesque, wholly sympathetic little comedian. The Great Dictator has enough pearls but no thread.

Through no fault of Chaplin's, during the two years he was at work on the picture dictators became too sinister for comedy. He probably intended to do an uproarious farce on dictatorship, or an amusing story of a shy little man who finds himself in a dictator's shoes. He ended by also doing an arraignment of the megalomania of dictatorship and the pathology of race hatred. Result: Chaplin the comedian and Chaplin the lover of democracy together run dictator-wild.

Chaplin throwing platefuls of strawberries & cream and the sight of Jews being shot in the streets do not mix. At one time Chaplin's dictator roars gibberish at crowds, at another he is abashed by Oakie, at a third he malignantly orders a pogrom. Even Chaplin's barber is not of a piece. At the end of the picture the long bewildered little man suddenly launches into a forceful, moving and undoubtedly heartfelt six-minute sermon on democracy.

Almost everybody will have to see this picture because it is Chaplin's first in four years. Almost nobody will ever want to see it again--as people still want to see The Kid and Shoulder Arms.

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