a review of 大独裁者

1st Annual Criterion Challenge Week 30: The 1940s I'll admit, I was maybe just a little bit mixed on this one in the early going. A lot of the political strongman satire feels cribbed from the Marx Bros. "Duck Soup" from seven years earlier; in particular, the scenes with the broadly-played Italian-accented Mussolini stand-in feel like second-hand Chico routines. On the other hand, I was surprised at how specific Chaplin was about Nazi anti-Semitism, instead of the kind of softer abstraction we more typically see in satires of the Third Reich. Especially given that the film was released over a year before the United States was officially fighting in WWII, which I have to assume was later held against Chaplin as evidence of "premature anti-fascism" during the Red Scare. Ultimately, the movie doesn't quite hit its target (which is forgivable given that events were still literally unfolding) but Chaplin's iconic speech (addressed directly to the American moviegoing audience, in a character-breaking moment) still hits hard today.