Charlie Chaplin's Prophecy...

According to Jürgen Trimborn’s biography of Nazi propaganda film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, both Chaplin and French film-maker René Clair viewed Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will together at a showing at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Film maker Luis Buñuel reports that Clair was horrified by the power of the film, crying out that this should never be shown or the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film. He used it to inspire many elements of The Great Dictator, and by repeatedly viewing this film, Chaplin could closely mimic Hitler’s mannerisms.

Trimborn suggests that Chaplin decided to proceed with making The Great Dictator after viewing Riefenstahl’s film. Hynkel’s major speech near the end of the film, delivered in German-sounding gibberish, is a caricature of Hitler’s oratory style, which Chaplin also studied carefully in newsreels.

The film was directed by Chaplin (with his half-brother Wheeler Dryden as assistant director), and written and produced by Chaplin. The film was shot largely at the Charlie Chaplin Studios and other locations around Los Angeles. The elaborate World War I scenes were filmed in Laurel Canyon. Chaplin and Meredith Willson composed the music. Filming began in September 1939 (coincidentally soon after Germany invaded Poland, triggering World War II) and finished six months later.

Chaplin wanted to address the escalating violence and repression of Jews by the Nazis throughout the late 1930s, the magnitude of which was conveyed to him personally by his European Jewish friends and fellow artists. The Third Reich’s repressive nature and militarist tendencies were well-known at the time. Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 To Be or Not To Be dealt with similar themes, and also used a mistaken-identity Hitler figure. But Chaplin later said that he would not have made the film had he known of the true extent of the Nazis’ crimes. After the horror of the Holocaust became known, filmmakers struggled for nearly 20 years to find the right angle and tone to satirize the era.

In the period when Hitler and his Nazi Party rose to prominence, Chaplin was becoming internationally popular. He was mobbed by fans on a 1931 trip to Berlin, which annoyed the Nazis. Resenting his style of comedy, they published a book titled The Jews Are Looking at You (1934), describing the comedian as “a disgusting Jewish acrobat” (although Chaplin was not Jewish). Ivor Montagu, a close friend of Chaplin, relates that he sent the comedian a copy of the book and always believed that Chaplin decided to retaliate with making Dictator.

In the 1930s cartoonists and comedians often built on Hitler and Chaplin having similar mustaches. Chaplin also capitalized on this resemblance in order to give his Little Tramp character a “reprieve”.

Charlie Chaplin’s son Charles Jr. describes that his father was haunted by the backgrounds shared by him and Hitler. He writes,

Their destinies were poles apart. One was to make millions weep, while the other was to set the whole world laughing. Dad could never think of Hitler without a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. “Just think”, he would say uneasily, “he’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around.”

Chaplin prepared the story throughout 1938 and 1939, and began filming in September 1939, one week after the beginning of World War II. He finished filming almost six months later. The 2002 TV documentary on the making of the film, The Tramp and the Dictator, presented newly discovered footage of the film production (shot by Chaplin’s elder half-brother Sydney) which showed Chaplin’s initial attempts at the film’s ending, filmed before the fall of France.

According to The Tramp and the Dictator, Chaplin arranged to send the film to Hitler, and an eyewitness confirmed he saw it. Hitler’s architect and friend Albert Speer denied that the leader had ever seen it. Hitler’s response to the film is not recorded, but another account tells that he viewed the film twice.

Some of the signs in the shop windows of the ghetto in the film are written in Esperanto, a language which Hitler condemned as a Jewish plot to internationalize and destroy German culture, perhaps because its founder was a Polish Jew.