Monday, January 21, 2008

The Gre8t Dictat0r


Have you seen this film?
"Charlie Chaplin's first dialogue picture, The Great Dictator (1940), was an act of defiance against Hitler and Nazism, filmed and released in the US one year before it abandoned its policy of isolationism to enter World War II. Chaplin played the role of a Nazi-like dictator "Adenoid Hynkel", Dictator of Tomainia, clearly modeled on Hitler.

The film was seen as an act of courage in the political environment of the time, both for its ridicule of Nazism and for the portrayal of overt Jewish characters and the depiction of their persecution. Chaplin played both the role of Adenoid Hynkel and also that of a look-alike Jewish barber cruelly persecuted by the Nazis. The barber physically resembles Chaplin's Tramp character, but is not considered to be the Tramp. At the conclusion, the two characters Chaplin portrayed swapped positions through a complex plot, and he dropped out of his comic character to address the audience directly in a speech." Above is the speech.

3 comments:

Kanmi the Conqueror said...

Those were the days that fighting for democracy, as he says, could be beleived.

styx said...

And then he was trialled for communism...

Anonymous said...

Unrelated. i checked out a new iranian movie from our library this week. it's title is "Day Break" and it is about the capital punishment in Iran. I thought you might like to watch it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477607/