The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charlie Chaplin · a film · 1940 · about 125 minutes · in English, the dictator’s speeches in an invented mock German
Mode
Satirical comedy of the body turned on a living regime; slapstick, pantomime, farce of state, a love story and at the close a direct address in earnest
Mythos
The double: the persecuted and the persecutor with one face; the prince and the pauper, the fool crowned; the man who would hold the world as a toy, and the world bursting
Phase
A prologue in the last days of the war of 1918, twenty years passed in a title, then some months in Tomainia, from Hynkel’s oration to the invasion of Osterlich and the speech that ends it
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, about 125 minutes; spoken dialogue in English, the dictator’s oratory in a mock German meant to be heard as sound, translated communiqués, and a score by Chaplin with Wagner and Brahms set into it
Register
From a gun whose shell drops at the gunner’s feet and a world bounced like a balloon to a ghetto’s windows painted by storm troopers and an address to the world; farce and fear in one film, and earnest at its end
Scale
A barber, a dictator, a ghetto, two states and a third invaded, and at the close humankind
Governing Proposition
A Jewish barber, wounded in the war of 1918 and kept from memory for twenty years, comes home to a ghetto ruled by Adenoid Hynkel, a dictator who has his face; when the barber is taken for the dictator, he is set before the microphones and speaks. The wager of the film is that the tyrant is a little man made monstrous by a crowd and a costume, that a comedy of the body can show what a regime sounds like and what it costs the people under it, and that a silent man given speech at the end can take speech back from the one who has abused it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the last days of the war of 1918. A small soldier, a Jewish barber of Tomainia in uniform, is set to fire a great gun; the shell drops out at the gunner’s feet and rolls after him. He ends in a plane with an officer, Schultz, and flies it upside down. The plane comes down, Schultz owes him his life, and the barber loses his memory. A title passes twenty years in a hospital.
The prologue is a long comedy in the manner of the short films with which Chaplin made his name, and it yields two things the rest of the film needs: Schultz’s debt, and a man who has missed the twenty years in which his country changed. Its first law is the one the film will end on: the military machine is absurd, and the little man survives it by accident.
Charles Chaplin wrote, produced and directed the film and plays both the barber and Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomainia. Paulette Goddard plays Hannah, Jack Oakie plays Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, Reginald Gardiner plays Schultz, Henry Daniell plays Garbitsch and Billy Gilbert plays Herring. Roland Totheroh and Karl Struss photographed it in black and white, Willard Nico edited it, and the music is Chaplin’s, with Meredith Willson as musical director. United Artists released it in 1940. It runs about 125 minutes and is judged as released that year. It was Chaplin’s first fully spoken film, made thirteen years after the coming of sound.
Movement II
Hynkel speaks before a crowd in a German that does not exist. It barks, rises, chokes and snarls; the microphones bend away from his heat; and an announcer gives the audience a calm summary in English of what the dictator has said. The joke is the disclosure. The rhetoric is noise, its rage is its content, and the official sense laid over it has nothing to do with the sound. Chaplin plays it as a virtuoso of the voice in a tongue without words, and the crowd’s answer is part of the performance.
In the palace the court is a nursery. Garbitsch counsels, Herring fawns, and the court is a nursery. Power in this film is made of voice, vanity and the crowd, and the comedy of the palace shows each.
Against the palace stands the ghetto, a street of shops. The barber comes home to his shop not knowing what has happened in twenty years. Storm troopers paint the windows. Hannah, who lives in the street, answers the troopers with a frying pan. The persecution of the Jews is the stated subject, on an American screen in 1940, and the film shows it as what the dictator’s vanity costs people who have only their shops and their windows. The street is drawn as a stage set and its people in outline, but what is done to them is not made light.
Movement III
Alone in his office, to the prelude of Wagner’s Lohengrin, Hynkel lifts a globe from its stand. It is a balloon. He bounces it on his head and on his rump, lies with it, turns with it in a slow ecstasy, and it bursts in his hands. It is beautiful, absurd and frightening at once, and its image of the world as a toy of one man’s desire is the film’s myth of pride in a single figure.
Then the film cuts to the barber in his shop, shaving a customer to the radio’s playing of Brahms’s Fifth Hungarian Dance. The razor keeps time with the music, every stroke on the beat. The same body, the same skill, is turned from desire to grace. The two scenes are the film’s argument in one pairing: the same face, and two uses of the same gift.
These are the two heights of the film’s middle, and they are made with an exactness that the rest of the making does not always keep. The camera is mostly plain and frontal and lets the performer carry the frame. Here image and music are joined to the beat, and the double is shown not by a plot but by a cut.
Movement IV
Schultz, whose life the barber saved in 1918, has risen in the regime, and now falls from it. The scene of the coins in the pudding follows; it is funny, and it restates what the ghetto has already shown, that its people are helpless. The barber is taken, and later escapes in uniform.
Napaloni of Bacteria comes on a state visit, and the film becomes a comedy of diplomacy. In a barbershop the two dictators sit in barber chairs and each cranks his own chair above the other’s. At a buffet the food becomes a field of battle while they bargain over Osterlich, the small neighbour each means to take. Jack Oakie matches Chaplin through the visit, and the visit is very funny, but it runs past what it argues, and the ethnic comedy of Napaloni’s scenes has aged.
This is the slackest stretch of the film. The routines are of the kind Chaplin made throughout his career, and another routine in place of the pudding or the buffet would change little. The figure that holds is the chairs: the gods who would rise, each by his own crank, toward a ceiling that stops them both.
Movement V
Tomainia invades Osterlich. Hynkel, out on the water in a duck boat, is arrested as the escaped barber; the barber, in uniform, is taken for Hynkel and led to a platform before the army and the microphones. The exchange is the old pattern of the prince and the pauper and the fool crowned, and it carries the film’s argument to its end: the tyrant’s power is a costume, and the costume can be put on by anyone.
The barber, who has barely spoken through the film, speaks for about five minutes. He steps out of the story, faces the camera, and addresses the soldiers and the world, asking them not to give themselves to brutes. The speech is the film’s boldest act and its greatest breach. The silent man takes speech back from the man who has abused it, and the comic character becomes the film’s mouthpiece; the knowledge the form has carried for two hours passes, at the end, into a statement.
The film cuts to Hannah in a field. The voice reaches her: “Look up, Hannah.” She lifts her face, and the music rises under it. The transport is real, and some find it overbearing. The film ends on her face turned upward.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test splits the film. What is required is the double: the barber and the dictator must share a face, since the argument is that the tyrant is a little man made monstrous by a crowd, and the little man can be taken for him. Every sequence that sets the two lives side by side bears weight: the oration answered by the ghetto, the globe dance answered by the shave, the arrest of the one answered by the elevation of the other. Much else could go. The 1918 prologue is a long comedy whose only necessary yield is Schultz’s debt and the barber’s lost memory. The pudding scene restates the ghetto’s helplessness, and the Napaloni visit, very funny, runs past what it argues. A required spine, and long stretches made of routines it permits rather than compels.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the film brings into the open is an articulated condition: the dictator as performer, his power made of voice, vanity and the crowd’s answer. Hynkel’s mock German discloses through sound what words would have argued: the rhetoric is noise, its rage is its content, the microphones bend from his heat, and an announcer’s bland translation shows the gap between the bark and its official sense. Garbitsch counsels, Herring fawns, and the court is a nursery. Against this the ghetto shows what the vanity does to people who have only their shops and windows, and the persecution of Jews is put on an American screen in 1940 as the stated subject. The figure is held because the film knows the regime as farce and pogrom, not as what it became, and because its final speech states its meaning rather than disclosing it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The film rises twice to a height few comedies reach, and between those heights it is mostly funny rather than elevated. The first is the globe dance: alone in his office to the prelude of Lohengrin, Hynkel lifts the world as a balloon, bounces it on his head and his rump, lies with it in a slow ecstasy, and it bursts in his hands. It is beautiful, absurd and frightening at once, and its image of the world as a toy of one man’s desire is exact. The shave to Brahms, the razor keeping time with the radio, is the same skill turned to grace. The second height is the close, the barber who has barely spoken speaking to the world, and the cut to Hannah in the field, a transport many have felt and some find overbearing. Frequency holds the figure: summits in a plain of good comedy.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The myth here is built and bears load. The double is its frame: the same face for the persecuted and the persecutor, the Tramp’s figure in all but name meeting the century’s tyrant, two men born four days apart in April 1889 and wearing the same moustache. The exchange of identities is the old pattern of the prince and the pauper, the king’s double, the fool crowned, used to argue that the tyrant’s power is a costume and that the costume can be put on by anyone, for good or ill. The globe dance makes a myth of pride in one image: the man who would hold the world as a toy, and the world bursting. The gods who would rise are two dictators in barber chairs, each cranking himself above the other. The figure is held below the gate by the second half’s comedy of diplomacy, which evokes rather than builds, and by the speech, which leaves the myth to address the audience directly.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The turn and the stake together, and the stake was very large. Chaplin, the cinema’s master of pantomime, who had kept dialogue out of City Lights and Modern Times, broke his own form to speak, and broke it further at the end by letting a comic character step out of the story to address the camera for about five minutes. He did it with his own money, to satirise a sitting head of state with whom his country was at peace, against the caution of the studios. The departure from his own tradition, slapstick turned on a regime and comedy made the instrument of political argument at feature length, is real. What holds the figure under the gate is that the means are largely inherited (the two-reel routine, the Tramp’s grammar, and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup of 1933, already a comedy of the dictator), and that the boldest act, the speech, is a rupture rather than a new form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The double role is the form of the argument, and the passage from pantomime to speech is its knowledge: Hynkel’s voice is noise, the barber’s body is eloquent, and the film ends by giving the silent man speech so that speech can be redeemed from the dictator. The gibberish German, the mock headlines and the Lohengrin under the globe are form doing the thinking: what a regime sounds like, and what it wants. Two things hold the figure. Much of the film is made as a sequence of self-contained routines whose form is that of Chaplin’s comedies in general, not of this argument; another routine in place of the pudding or the buffet would change little. And the speech, the film’s culmination, abandons the comic form rather than completing it, so that the work’s knowledge at its end is carried by a statement any form could carry.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: eighty-six years of return. The film has been re-examined steadily on several fronts: as the one comedy of its moment that named the persecution of the Jews; as the hinge of Chaplin’s art from silence to speech, and from the Tramp to the talking Chaplin of the later films; on the ethics of laughter at a regime that was about to commit genocide; and through the speech, which has had a long second life apart from the film, quoted, reposted and set to music. The globe dance yields more on each return, more image than gag. What the return finds less of is depth in the people and in the middle of the film: Hannah, Schultz and the ghetto are drawn in outline, the diplomacy reads once as farce and then as farce again, and much of the return goes to the film’s situation and its maker rather than to what the film holds within it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Released in 1940, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: a popular comedy at the top of its art turned on a living dictator before the United States entered the war, the most famous man in the cinema staking his public on a political argument, and a comic grammar shown capable of carrying fury and grief. That changed what comedy could be asked to do more than how films are made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of satire on tyrants runs through it to Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), to Mel Brooks and to later films that mock dictators, and the closing speech has had a reach in public life larger than almost any passage of film dialogue. The formal language of cinema was not redirected by it: in the decade of Citizen Kane, neorealism and noir, it is the silent comedian’s art carried into sound, and its influence is thematic and moral more than formal.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-six years. The form is whole: the film survives as released in 1940, and restorations are repair. Presence has been very wide and continuous: theatrical reissue, television, every home format, teaching, and the speech and the globe dance circulating far beyond the film. The charge falls on surface. This is a topical satire, made in 1939 and 1940 against a named regime in its moment, Tomainia, Bacteria, Osterlich and the invasion thin veils for the events of 1938, and the ethnic comedy of the Napaloni scenes has aged. What lifts the axis is that the moment it fixes became the century’s archetype of tyranny, so the satire has outlived its occasion as few topical works do; what holds it a step below the films that keep their surface clear over such a span is that its surface remains visibly that of its year.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the highest craft is Chaplin’s performance, in two registers: Hynkel’s oratory, a virtuoso work of sound and gesture in a tongue that does not exist, and the barber’s silent body, which still commands every routine. The globe dance and the Brahms shave are as exact as anything he made, image and music joined to the beat. Jack Oakie’s Napaloni matches him in the visit. Sound is used with invention: the mock German, the translated communiqués, Wagner under the globe and again under the close. What holds the figure is that the command bears weight in the performances and the set pieces more than in the making of the film as a whole. Roland Totheroh and Karl Struss’s camera is mostly plain and frontal, the cutting lets the middle of the film run slack, the ghetto is a stage set, and the 1918 prologue and the buffet run longer than their timing can carry.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the gun whose shell drops at the gunner’s feet in 1918, and the barber at the microphone asking soldiers not to give themselves to brutes. One law reaches both in part: the military machine is absurd, the little man survives it by accident, and the film ends by asking the machine’s men to stop. The double holds Hynkel’s palace and the ghetto under one law, the costume of power. The range is very wide, from slapstick and pantomime to a pogrom and a direct address in earnest, and that width is credited. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is strain at the joins. The ghetto’s terror and the buffet’s slapstick live in different films; the barber of the speech is not the barber of the rest, who has hardly a sentence in him; and the film knows it is breaking its own law and does so on purpose. The breach is chosen, and it is still a breach.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Judged on what a comedy of about 125 minutes holds, and it holds many orders, most of them integrated. The state and its machine (the palace, the propaganda ministry, the army, the invasion), international politics (two dictators bargaining over a small neighbour), the persecution of a people, the life of a street and its shops, the war past and the war coming, a love story, and at the end an address to humankind and its future, all hang on the one structure of the double. Labour is present in the barber’s trade; faith only in passing, for the ghetto is Jewish in name and scarcely in practice; consciousness hardly at all, since the film knows its people from outside. The outline drawing of the ghetto and the speech’s turn to the general, which enlarges the claim more than it integrates it, hold the axis where it is.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, The Swerve at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3. A satire whose occasion became the century’s figure of tyranny, surviving whole with a presence far beyond the cinema; the master of pantomime breaking his form to speak, with his own money, against a sitting head of state; and the double built as the frame of the work, with the globe as a myth of pride in one image.
Limiting Dimension
The Inner Law at 7.5: one law of the absurd machine and the costume of power reaches from the 1918 gun to the closing speech, but the ghetto’s terror and the buffet’s slapstick live in different films, and the barber of the speech is not the barber of the rest. Above it, The Inevitable at 7.6, a required spine of paired sequences among routines it permits rather than compels, and The Encompassed at 7.8, many orders hung on the double while the people are known from outside.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.1, The Living Form at 7.9, The Inner Law at 7.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 two tenths short, and The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.5, which The Inner Law meets exactly. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.0 from a sum of 96.5, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Great Dictator as released by United Artists in 1940, in black and white, about 125 minutes, from the gun in 1918 to Hannah in the field: written, produced and directed by Charles Chaplin, who plays the barber and Hynkel, photographed by Roland Totheroh and Karl Struss, edited by Willard Nico, with music by Chaplin and Meredith Willson as musical director. The film is judged as released in 1940; later reissues and restorations repair it and are not judged as other versions. No print, script or transcript was consulted. The film is in English, with Hynkel’s speeches in an invented mock German meant to be heard as sound, not sense; dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and the closing speech is described rather than quoted. Particular frame compositions and the lengths of individual sequences are not relied on. Claims that could not be verified, among them the date of the New York premiere, the film’s returns, how censors abroad were prepared to treat it before the war, later remarks attributed to Chaplin about what he would have made had he known of the camps, and which later films cite it, are not given.