Charlie Chaplin: The Greatest Speech Ever Made During War Era

Final Speech (From “The Great Dictator”)

The Great Dictator: Charlie Chaplin plays the joker and the madman

In this political comedy-drama, The Great Dictator, that satirized fascism and condemned Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, anti-Semitism, and the Nazis, Chaplin plays two roles of identical characters: one is a ruthless dictator named Adenoid Hynkel and the other a persecuted Jewish barber. A series of comedic events transpire and the barber is mistaken for Hynkel. In the movie’s final scene, the barber takes the stage to give a speech to the gathered masses, and it is this speech, written and delivered to perfection by Chaplin, that has surprisingly gone down in history as one of the most inspiring and evocative orations.

Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in the movie.

This movie is a classic for a reason. It’s startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it’s renowned as well for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the mélange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.

Chaplin’s anti-fascist argument pursues the fascist in all of us, and the implication of his equation of the victim with the dictator is not only that the comic could have been the madman but that even the good guys and the persecuted, represented by the world’s best-loved clown, are not to be trusted with absolute power. Chaplin’s finest further touch, having made his dictator ridiculous, is to remind us of how much harm even ridiculous people can do. Nothing in the film is quite as frightening as the sight and sound of the ludicrous Hynkel casually ordering the execution of three thousand striking workers. We should know better, but we easily forget how lethal the ludicrous can be.

Over 70 years after the death and destruction wrought during the last World War came to a halt, the world is still gripped in the vice of detrimental prejudices and ideologies. Race, religion, and nationality have divided the people who are being manipulated by those in power for their personal gains. And if things don’t change soon, we might soon be heading towards another great war, and this time, it might just be the final one mankind will fight. Things need to change and they need to change now, of that there is no doubt. And perhaps messages like this one by Chaplin need to be heard once again for that to happen.

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