1940 comedy, dir. and starring Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard:
IMDb /
allmovie. A hapless Jewish
barber happens to be the exact double of don't-call-him-Hitler.
And it may just be that I don't really do comedy, but I think the
time for this film has thoroughly passed. In 1940 Americans could
still pretend not to know what was going on in Nazi Germany, and enjoy
the conflicts framed here with as much seriousness as a Tom and
Jerry cartoon: har har, people are getting knocked on the head in a
comedic manner, the big bully is made to look silly. Now, not so much.
At the same time this film presents a view of Hitler as the keystone
of Nazism: it may be not-Goebbels urging him on to evil, but take him
out of the picture and the whole Nazi system falls apart. I think this
is mostly a standard element of American pop-culture: it's not the
whole society that's gone wrong, and it's definitely not the rich
industrialists who own the media, it's this one guy with a face that
the hero can punch (or in this case not punch) and then everything
will be sorted out. (To be fair, covert operations planners made the
same error; it was only a few years into the war that they stopped
coming up with schemes to assassinate Hitler, on the grounds that his
inevitable replacement might well be someone competent.)
But what of the film? There's some Chaplin clowning, and while this
was his first sound film there's a fair bit without speech (and when
people do talk, the rhythm is off, as if they're waiting to speak over
an intertitle card rather than reacting to the action). But there's
also the terrible state of things in the ghetto, and of course a Girl
(Goddard was 19 years younger than Chaplin and his wife at the time of
filming.) And there are the cutaways to not-Hitler, some of which is
clowning (like the effective sequence in which he's dancing with a
giant globe), some slapstick, some comedic oneupmanship (like the
meeting with not-Mussolini in which he tries to set up the chairs so
as to have a height advantage). But of course there are also the
sequences in which not-Goebbels (Henry Daniell, in the tradition of
British actors playing the real villains) encourages not-Hitler to go
after the Jews, whom not-Hitler himself doesn't really care about one
way or the other. And then it's back to the ghetto to see the results
of these lightly taken decisions, and so on.
Some critics have spend great effort on trying to work out whether
Chaplin's barber is meant to be "the same" as his standard Little
Tramp character. I don't think the question is meaningful; he shares
some mannerisms and expressions, but not others, and to say
definitively "yes" or "no" would be meaningless. Not-Hitler is frankly
more interesting to watch.
But what really did for Chaplin's career at the time was not the lack
of skill with sound filming or the whiplashes in mood but rather the
preachy monologue at the end. What, after all, is so funny about
peace, love and understanding? Especially in an America divided
between trying to ignore what was going on and trying to whip up
militaristic fervour; the time for subtlety had already passed.
There are some good moments, but I can't recommend watching the film
in full.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.