Classic Films in Focus: THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940)

We think of Charlie Chaplin as a silent comedian, but he also made a number of talkies in his later career, the best known of which is The Great Dictator (1940), which offers a direct response to the global catastrophe then brewing on the European front. In this picture, made before the United States actually entered the war against Hitler, Chaplin demonstrates the courage of his convictions as well as his ability to pull off a fully realized speaking role. Some critics, including David Thomson, find fault with the idealistic speech that Chaplin delivers at the film’s climax, but people around the world must have responded to it enthusiastically in 1940, with that feeling of being on a terrible precipice that Chaplin so passionately captures. Today, those who appreciate the bravery in Chaplin’s cinematic statement will still find The Great Dictator powerful stuff, and film fans will also enjoy the performances of Chaplin himself as well as Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Henry Daniell, and Billy Gilbert.

Chaplin plays dual roles as a meek Jewish barber and the dictator Adenoid Hynkel, the ruler of a fictional country obviously meant to represent Nazi Germany. The barber, shell-shocked from his service in the previous war, emerges from a mental hospital to find his community under siege from Hynkel’s brutal stormtroopers and mounting violence. Hannah (Paulette Goddard), an orphaned Jewish girl, takes pity on the barber and even comes to love him, while a military officer (Reginald Gardiner) whose life the barber once saved draws him and his neighbors into a dangerous plan to end Hynkel’s tyranny. As the barber and his friends confront one hardship after another, Hynkel himself schemes against his fellow dictator, Napaloni (Jack Oakie), and aspires to world domination.

Of course the plot eventually involves the barber being mistaken for Hynkel, but that switch occurs very late in the picture. Until then, we move back and forth between Hynkel’s actions in his lavish palace and the barber’s sufferings in the Jewish ghetto. Both have their moments of comedy and drama, although Hynkel is played mostly as a buffoon, with Henry Daniell’s insidious Garbitsch as the evil mind behind the worst atrocities committed in Hynkel’s name. The barber, showing his affinity with Chaplin’s Little Tramp character, mostly runs from the troopers and engages in slapstick combat; he has no delusions of heroism but is pushed and buffeted by fate toward his climactic moment in the spotlight. Hynkel’s best scenes pit him against his rival, Napaloni, whose friendly manner of bullying the smaller dictator incenses Hynkel and drives him to increasingly extreme antics. The film’s most memorable moment, aside from the final speech, is Hynkel’s dance with a floating globe, a graceful and even beautiful metaphor for Hitler’s deadly pas de deux with the actual world.

Chaplin’s supporting players give him plenty to react to, especially Paulette Goddard as the feisty orphan, Hannah. Goddard and Chaplin were a real life couple at the time, but they would divorce in 1942, and the legality of their marriage has never been quite clear. Luckily their union lasted long enough for Goddard to play this role, which she performs with great energy and pluck, especially when Hannah repeatedly whacks stormtroopers on the head with a frying pan. Most of the other supporting characters are male, although Grace Hayle plays Mrs. Napaloni as a kind of Margaret Dumont character from the Marx Brothers canon, always unsure about what is going on around her and usually being tripped up by one of the more chaotic men. Maurice Moscovitch is sympathetic and wise as the Jewish community’s leader, Mr. Jaeckel, while Henry Daniell delivers a memorable villain in the sneeringly heartless Garbitsch, who constantly pours his poisonous ideas into Hynkel’s receptive ear. Schultz, the one good officer in Hynkel’s army, comes off as a sadly flat character, but Reginald Gardiner doesn’t get much opportunity to flesh him out. Jack Oakie, on the other hand, enjoys lots of screen time as the cartoonish Napaloni, whose size and bombastic talk irk little Hynkel so effectively.

The Great Dictator earned five Oscar nominations, including nods for Chaplin and Oakie, but it won nothing, thanks to a year of strong contenders that included The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Rebecca (1940). See Chaplin and Goddard together in the earlier film, Modern Times (1936), and look for Goddard on her own in The Women (1939), So Proudly We Hail! (1943), and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). For more of Chaplin’s sound films, try Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), or A King in New York (1957). Don’t miss career villain Henry Daniell in The Sea Hawk (1940), The Woman in Green (1945), and The Body Snatcher (1945). For another anti-Nazi comedy made during Hitler’s reign, see To Be or Not to Be (1942), which makes an excellent double bill with The Great Dictator.

Classic Films in Focus: THE GHOST BREAKERS (1940)

The "old dark house" picture has been a staple of the horror and horror-comedy genres at least as far back as the silent classic, The Cat and the Canary (1927), long before the Scooby Gang made it the regular fare of children's entertainment. To this tradition you may add The Ghost Breakers (1940), a creepy comedy featuring all kinds of silly scares and a very young Bob Hope firing off one-liners like silver bullets. While some of the film's touchier aspects may lessen the modern viewer's enthusiasm for the movie, The Ghost Breakers has plenty of laughs and even some genuine thrills to warrant attention, and kids will probably enjoy its humorous take on the haunted house theme.

Bob Hope plays Larry Lawrence (aka Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence, because his parents "lacked creativity"), a radio celebrity whose news scoops involving the mob get him into hot water. When Larry goes to confront the gangsters, he accidentally gets mixed up in the affairs of Mary Carter (Paulette Goddard), who has just inherited a cursed Cuban castle. Larry and his sidekick Alex (Willie Best) accompany Mary to Cuba to investigate the property's ghoulish reputation; once there, they discover both corporeal and ghostly threats lurking in the castle's moonlit halls.

Hope and Paulette Goddard make a fine pair, and they share some very good scenes that combine romance and comedy in equal measure. No shrinking violet, Goddard's Mary is a plucky heroine, ready to engage Larry's silly humor or to venture alone into the haunted castle at night. She becomes especially lovely when she assumes the costume of a long dead ancestor; the stunning black dress, designed by Edith Head, is a real winner, and it suits the actress perfectly. Hope is remarkably handsome, although his distinctive features still suggest the fool more than the hero; his obvious jealousy when another man enters the picture engages our sympathy for fear he should lose the lovely Mary to a more conventional sort of leading man.

The only real hitch in the picture is Willie Best's appearance as Alex, Larry's manservant and companion. There are two ways to react to the performance: you can either decry it as another "Stepin Fetchit" stereotype or you can appreciate how much Best is able to do with it in spite of the attitudes of the day. Best was one of the best-known black character actors in the business, notable enough to recieve credit for small roles when most performers would not. His goggle-eyed reaction shots are typical of the era, and Best eventually lost the public's support as a new generation of African-Americans sought to distance themselves from such portrayals. Still, Alex is Larry's functional equal in the film; often more practical than Larry, and no more frightened by the specters than his white companions, Alex is more sidekick than servant, and Best certainly knows how to hold the screen against the charismatic Hope. If you watch the film with younger viewers, it's a good idea to talk about Best's character and how depictions of minorities have changed since the 1940s, but children are more likely to regard Alex as a full participant in the comedy than a mere stereotype, and that may be the wisest and most appreciative way to view Best's performance.

Look for Anthony Quinn playing a dual role as Cuban twin brothers, as well as Virginia Brissac rendered utterly unrecognizable under the heavy make-up of the zombie mother. If you like haunted house movies, be sure to catch The Old Dark House (1932) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). For more spooky comedy, try Topper (1937), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Hope and Goddard also starred together in a 1939 remake of The Cat and the Canary. Bob Hope is best remembered today for his road movies with Bing Crosby, but he also stars in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), Casanova's Big Night (1954), and The Seven Little Foys (1955). You can see more of Paulette Goddard in Modern Times (1936), The Women (1939), and The Great Dictator (1940). The Ghost Breakers, which began life as a stage play, was remade in 1953 by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as Scared Stiff, with Lewis filling the role that Willie Best had plays in the 1940 version.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: MODERN TIMES (1936)

Long past the point where Hollywood had turned to sound, Charlie Chaplin continued to believe in the silent film, although Modern Times (1936) does make use of sound in its own unique way. This would be the final appearance of the Tramp character whom Chaplin had first introduced in the Keystone comedies over twenty years before, and, fittingly, it reveals a bittersweet sentimentality, mingling real suffering and injustice with its slapstick laughs. For many Chaplin fans, Modern Times ranks as the greatest of the artist's films, and it certainly retains its charms today, demonstrating the eternal appeal of Chaplin's work and his sympathetic everyman hero.

The Tramp, as usual, encounters wildly varying highs and lows over the course of his adventures, which begin with his employment in a large, impersonal factory. He soon suffers a nervous breakdown as a result of the monotonous, grinding work on the factory floor and is committed to an asylum. When he recovers, he learns that the factories have closed and work is scarce. Mistaken for the leader of a workers' protest, the Tramp is thrown into jail, but he becomes a cellblock hero when he prevents a jailbreak. He likes jail so much that he begs to stay even after his actions win him a pardon. Determined to return to the comforts of his cell, the Tramp aids a young street urchin (Paulette Goddard) in the hope of being arrested, but his relationship with the penniless girl eventually alters the course of his efforts.

Watching Modern Times in the current historical moment is a strange experience; sometimes it seems too modern for comfort. The film details the miseries of unemployment and poverty when work is hard to find, and it reveals the dangers of an automated, assembly-line society, where people literally function as mere cogs in the machine. Work of this kind will kill the soul, but its absence starves the body, and the Tramp is all too right in preferring his prison cell to such a terrible set of choices. Early in the film, voice and power are given to the factory boss, who sits idle in his office while he demands an increasingly breakneck pace of labor from the workers. The Tramp and the girl later find a temporary respite from hardship in the world of performance, where they support themselves by singing and dancing. The Tramp's song number, a comical tune sung in a gibberish language, finally gives him a voice, too, but outside forces conspire to rob the downtrodden pair of their refuge, just as political persecution would drive Chaplin himself from the United States in 1952.

Chaplin performs the Tramp brilliantly, as always, but Modern Times has the additional attraction of Paulette Goddard as the Gamin. Chaplin's girl characters were often melodramatic innocents, like the mission worker of Easy Street (1917) or the blind flower girl in City Lights (1931), but Goddard plays a feisty, scrappy girl of the streets, a dirty rebel who steals bananas and dances about with barefoot grace. When she appeared in Modern Times, Goddard was still an unknown appearing in uncredited bit parts, but she went on to have a successful Hollywood career; she even earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in So Proudly We Hail! (1943). As the Gamin, her flashing eyes and defiant posture make her a fascinating foil to Chaplin's gentle Tramp, and she deftly proves her own ability to hold the screen with that iconic character. In real life, Goddard and Chaplin were romantically involved when this film was made, but their relationship ended in the early 1940s.

Modern Times is also known for its use of Chaplin's great musical composition, "Smile," which serves as a theme for the film. For more films starring The Little Tramp, try The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928). Along with Modern Times, City Lights (1931) is considered one of Chaplin's best pictures. Look for Paulette Goddard with Chaplin again in The Great Dictator (1940). She also makes memorable appearances in The Women (1939), The Ghostbreakers (1940), and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.