While I didn’t personally enjoy the film, I will never dispute the importance of The Great Dictator. This movie came out just around the time that World War II was really starting to heat up, and so I respect any filmmaker that’s ballsy enough to parody Adolf Hitler during the time when he was at the height of his power. The Great Dictator is an important film that shows the power of satire that movies can bring under terrible circumstances. While director Charlie Chaplin later said that he would have never made the movie if he knew the true horrors of the Jewish concentration camps at the time, I’m still glad that this movie got made, because it was a fearless movie that tore down a truly awful dictator.

In the film, Charlie Chaplin plays both of the two main characters. One is that of Adenoid Hynkel, a ruthless dictator looking to expand his empire. The other is that of a Jewish barber, who awakens after a 20 year coma to find that he’s now facing persecution from the ruthless dictator. This is about the main extent of the plot, so I’m not going to go much more in-depth than that.

The Great Dictator is a movie that I respect, but that I don’t enjoy. I think that the movie has very strong elements of satire in it, but that they can unfortunately fall flat. Much like some of Chaplin’s other films like Modern Times, I found that the movie has some really great scenes, but that the experience as a whole is kind of lacking. There are a handful of moments in the movie that I really enjoyed for sure. The biggest example of this is, of course, the speech at the end of the movie, for which this movie has become famous. Chaplin delivers a riveting speech as the Jewish barber impersonating the dictator, and it’s truly remarkable. I consider it to be one of the best speeches in movie history, so I don’t want to not give the movie props for this.

I have a few very distinct problems with the movie though. One such problem is that I found the dual storyline device to not be very effective here. I like the idea, in theory, that we get to focus on the parallel lives of the dictator and the Jew, but it ends up not being utilized well. In the first half, much of the focus is on the Jewish barber, with practically no attention being given to Hynkel. The roles then reverse in the second half, with the barber losing almost all of his importance to the plot. I just think that there could have been a better balance here.

Another problem is that the movie just drags. I think that a comedic satire like this needs to be very high-energy to be effective, and yet The Great Dictator really doesn’t keep things moving all that well. I think the best example of a movie in this era doing it right is Duck Soup, where we have satire that just keeps the laughs coming. The Great Dictator aims for moments of levity, which I can understand, but it just didn’t work well for this movie and made things feel very low-energy overall.

This brings me to my final point, which is just that The Great Dictator simply isn’t all that funny. In fact, it usually just feels awkward. I think the biggest reason for this is Charlie Chaplin’s filmmaking style. Chaplin is a master of the visual gag, and so his style winded up working really well for him in silent films. Chaplin also clearly loved making silent films, as he was one of the only filmmakers that exclusively made silent films well into the sound era. The Great Dictator is actually his first true sound film, and the transition just feels awkward. There are still plenty of moments in the movie where Chaplin employs his visual gags without much sound, and so the effect is a little jarring. It’s clear that he just didn’t know what to do with a sound film, and so what we have is a sound film that’s still trying to be a silent film. This makes many of the gags not as effective as they could be.

Again, I don’t want to deny the importance of The Great Dictator. It was one of the first of its kind to do what it did, and it’s truly a pretty brave effort to release a movie mocking the most powerful dictator at the time. I respect the movie for what it is, I just don’t personally think it’s all that great of a movie. I think it’s fascinating to watch in a historical context since it’s a product of its time, I just don’t think it’s all that entertaining as a movie. This is probably one of my personal least favorite Charlie Chaplin movies, to be honest.

2.5/5