The Great Dictator (1940)
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.
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What critics compared The Great Dictator to
I will say that there are fleeting moments of biting satirical genius that are reminiscent of the very clear inspiration of for this film Chaplin’s The Great Dictator ; But the 3 minutes of the film’s total success drown in (an albeit short – but drawn out) 84 minute running time.
The plucky nature of Baron Cohen’s protagonists harken back to Chaplin — and the easiest point of comparison is “The Great Dictator,” right down to the crude Western imitation of foreign language that forms Wadiya’s native tongue — but the creators of Wadiya owe a tremendous debt to “Duck Soup” and its own fictionalized dictatorship, Freedonia.
Certainly in 2012, a brutal dictator qualifies as an easy target for comedy (that wasn't true in 1940, when Charlie Chaplin released The Great Dictator , to which The Dictator implicitly nods).
A few thoughts present themselves: first, despite how apparently the movie wants to be regarded as a raunchy, 21st Century The Great Dictator , the film in which Charles Chaplin and Jack Oakie played such inspired parodies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, there's no way for the film to breathe as much as a satire as it always seems that it wants to for the straightforward reason that Aladeen isn't a "real" dictator.
Cohen is subtly making his case to be known as the Charlie Chaplin of our time by echoing Chaplin's Hitler satire, The Great Dictator .
In “The Dictator” Cohen matches Charlie Chaplin’s teachable monologue from Chaplin’s 1940 masterpiece “The Great Dictator” with a third-act soliloquy that will ruffle more than a few feathers.
Movies like “The Great Dictator” and “To Be or Not to Be” have taken similar approaches and gone on to become revered comedy classics that still manage to pack a considerable comedic punch today.
Jojo Rabbit has been called many things – an anti-hate satire, as the poster and trailers proclaim; a descendant of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; a misstep of catastrophic proportions comparable to Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried.
Despite the efforts of the Third Reich, Nazi jokes are as old as Nazis, predating even Charlie Chaplin's pompous "Adenoid Hynkel" in 1940's The Great Dictator.
But of course, absurd as the idea may seem, some attempts to wring humor from the horrors of Nazi Germany have stood the test of time: Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not To Be,” Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” to name a few.
Granted that Waitiki’s nutty version of the infamous German dictator does not have the same lofty legs of lunacy as witnessed by Mel Brooks’ impishly warped “Springtime for Hitler” nor does it compare to Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler knockoff, Adenoid Hynkel, from “The Great Dictator.”
Despite what Disney and Fox Searchlight's trailer marketing might lead you to believe, Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is neither the quirky New Zealander's riff on Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, nor the feature-length version of Mel Brooks' fake "Springtime for Hitler" musical from The Producers.
That leads to a madcap pursuit also involving Captain Henckels (Edward Norton) of the proto-fascist military police (with a character name certainly meant to recall Hynkel of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”); a prison break led by a brooding convict named Ludwig (Harvey Keitel); the intervention of a secret society of master concierges (among whose members are Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Fisher Stevens, Waris Ahluwalia and Wally Wolodarsky); a surrealistically funny ski-and-toboggan chase, ending with a homage to Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”; and a gun battle at the hotel itself.
Thomson delivers a crushingly harsh verdict on Anderson’s film: “It relates to the atmosphere and texture of Stefan Zweig like an achingly sweet pastry on a tin plate at Auschwitz-Birkenau.” There’s a long, complex debate to be had on the question of whether it is appropriate or adequate to view the horrors of modern history through a lens of humor or indeed whimsy—a debate that would have to span from To Be or Not to Be and The Great Dictator to their echo in the Zig-Zag militia in The Grand Budapest Hotel .
As the 1932 storyline comes to a close, the fictional Zubrowka is invaded entirely by a Nazi-like army (calling for immediate comparisons with Ernst Lubitsch‘s To Be or Not To Be, Powell and Pressburger‘s A Matter of Life and Death, and Charlie Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator; esteemed company it certainly earns).
Movies like “The Great Dictator” and “To Be or Not To Be” lampooned Nazis with forceful satire.
…particularly when the Wizard toys with a balloon map of Oz, a la Chaplin in the THE GREAT DICTATOR.
…whose balloon dance and squawking horns allude to Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator”…
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When Benigni hilariously impersonates a Mussolini-regime official, the scene owes an obvious debt to The Great Dictator, but Benigni earns the comparison.
It's an expert bit of clowning (Benigni owes a debt to Chaplin's The Great Dictator), but you can feel the pit growing in your stomach even as you giggle.
Roberto Benigni’s finest hour arrived in 1997 when the triple-threat writer/director/actor delved deep into Charlie Chaplin territory — see “The Great Dictator” (1940).
He fancies himself as the heir to Chaplin and this film is surely meant to be his version of "The Great Dictator".
And, if there is another reason for not disapproving offhand of the film's comic handling of this horrific context, then let's bring up Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
Perhaps not since Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire The Great Dictator has a filmmaker taken on such awful personalities and events and attempted to make us laugh about it all.
If Ernst Lubitsch could make fun of Nazis in "To Be or Not to Be" (1942) and Charlie Chaplin could parody Hitler in "The Great Dictator" (1940), why shouldn't Sandler go for the brass ring in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan?" Whenever there's something people fear, that they don't even want to think about, that's an opportunity for comedy.
Chaplin managed it—just—with The Great Dictator, as did Lubitsch two years later, with To Be or Not to Be .
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Hoping to be cheered up, they go to see Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," although if they'd bought tickets to another comedy of the same period, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne's "My Favorite Wife," they might have been better prepared for what fate holds in store for them.
We've been laughing at and booing Nazis for decades in such comic fare as To Be or Not to Be (1942), The Great Dictator (1940), and The Producers (1967).