15

The Great Dictator

Quite apart from its particular merits as a film, The Great Dictator remains an unparalleled phenomenon, an odd symbolic incident in the history of the twentieth century. The greatest clown and best-loved personality of his age directly challenges the man who had instigated more evil and human misery than any other in modern history.

There was, to begin with, something uncanny in the resemblance between Chaplin and Adolf Hitler, representing these opposite poles of humanity. On 21 April 1939, a year and a half before the release of The Great Dictator, an unsigned article in the Spectator noted:

Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other … Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society; the date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr Chaplin) might well have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius. For genius each of them undeniably possesses. Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the ‘little man’ in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil. In Chaplin the little man is a clown, timid, incompetent, infinitely resourceful yet bewildered by a world that has no place for him. The apple he bites has a worm in it; his trousers, remnants of gentility, trip him up; his cane pretends to a dignity his position is far from justifying; when he pulls a lever it is the wrong one and disaster follows. He is a heroic figure, but heroic only in the patience and resource with which he receives the blows that fall upon his bowler. In his actions and loves he emulates the angels. But in Herr Hitler the angel has become a devil. The soleless boots have become Reitstieffeln; the shapeless trousers, riding breeches; the cane, a riding crop; the bowler, a forage cap. The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only the moustache is the same.

There were even those who believed that Hitler had first adopted the moustache in a deliberate attempt to suggest a resemblance to the man who had attracted so much love and loyalty in the world.

Konrad Bercovici brought a plagiarism suit against Chaplin, claiming that he had first given him the idea of playing Hitler in the mid-1930s.¹ A good many newspaper cartoonists, notably David Low, might equally have claimed the idea as their own; it was, after all, inevitable. Much later Chaplin admitted, ‘Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.’² Hitler, it was true, turned out to be no laughing matter; but there was nothing light-hearted either in Chaplin’s deeper intentions in making the film. He suffered very real and acute pain and revulsion at the horrors and omens of world politics in the 1930s. We have seen, in his 1931 diatribe against the myths of patriotism, that he already foresaw, with dread, another war. His recent Far Eastern tour had made him more alert than most to the perils of the China Incident of July 1937 and the escalation of the Sino–Japanese conflict.

He was no less disturbed by events in Spain. In April 1938, the French film magazine Cinémonde published a translation of a remarkable short story by Chaplin, entitled ‘Rhythme’.³ It describes the execution of a Spanish Loyalist, a popular humorous writer. The officer in charge of the firing squad was formerly a friend of the condemned man; ‘their divergent views were then friendly, but they had finally provoked the unhappiness and disruption of the whole of Spain’. The officer and the six men of the firing squad all privately hope that a reprieve may still come. Finally, though, the officer must give the rhythmic orders: ‘Attention! … Shoulder arms! … Present arms! … Fire!’ The officer gives the first three orders. Hurried footsteps are heard: all realize that it is the reprieve. The officer calls out ‘Stop!’ to his firing squad, but

Six men each held a gun. Six men had been trained through rhythm. Six men, hearing the shout ‘Stop!’ fired.

The story at once embodies those fears of seeing men turned into machines which Chaplin had expressed in Modern Times, and looks forward to some grim, ironic gags in The Great Dictator.

There is more evidence of Chaplin’s feelings about Spain in a poem which he scribbled in a folio notebook among some memoranda on the development of Regency, presumably in the winter of 1936–7.⁴ The poem was quite clearly never meant for publication, or even for other eyes. It was a private attempt to express his sentiments.

To a dead Loyalist soldier

on the battlefields of Spain

Prone, mangled form,

Your silence speaks your deathless cause,

Of freedom’s dauntless march.

Though treachery befell you on this day

And built its barricades of fear and hate

Triumphant death has cleared the way

Beyond the scrambling of human life

Beyond the pale of imprisoning spears

To let you pass.

There was, he said euphemistically, ‘a good deal of bad behaviour in the world’. Feeling as deeply as he did, he was impelled to do whatever he could to correct it, or at least to focus attention upon it. His only weapon, as he knew, was comedy.

In the latter part of the 1930s Chaplin was very friendly with the director King Vidor and his family, and it was through the Vidors, some time in 1938, that he met Tim Durant. Like Harry Crocker, Durant was a tall, good-looking, patrician, university-educated young man: Chaplin seemed to have a penchant for the type among his friends and assistants. Durant had the added merits of being sympathetic, amusing, discreet, and very good at tennis. Through Durant Chaplin was introduced into the society of Pebble Beach and Carmel, one hundred miles south of San Francisco. Chaplin called Pebble Beach ‘the abode of lost souls’. He was fascinated, charmed and attracted by the collection of Californian millionaires who still made their homes there, and no less by the abandoned mansions that now lay in decay. The more Bohemian colony at nearby Carmel, a section of coast much favoured by artists and writers, had a different but potent attraction. He was especially pleased by his meetings there with the famous Californian poet Robinson Jeffers.

Tim Durant remembered Chaplin’s initial reluctance to become involved with the Pebble Beach set:

I knew a girl who was married to one of the Crockers in San Francisco, and she heard I was there and called me up and asked me to come over for dinner and bring Charlie. But Charlie said to me, ‘Listen, Tim, I don’t want to get into this group at all …’ I said, ‘Look, Charlie, will you do this just as a personal favour – I don’t ask you to do anything. Will you just go over and have dinner with them, and we can say honestly that we have to get back and do some work, and you can leave immediately.’

He said, ‘All right, Tim; but get me out of there, remember, don’t let me spend the evening there.’

So we went over there. We walked in and everybody congregated around him, you know, and he was a hero. He had an audience, and he couldn’t leave – wanted to stay until three o’clock in the morning. After that he wanted to go out every night, because they accepted him as a great artist and a wonderful person. They loved him and he entertained them, and we went out all the time. He wrote many stories – took notes of stories about the characters there. He had an idea of making a story about the people there.⁵

One of his hosts was D. L. James, who lived in a Spanish-style mansion perched on the cliff edge at Carmel, one of northern California’s architectural monuments. (James’s parents actually had him baptized ‘D. L.’ with the idea that he could choose names to suit the initials when he grew up. In fact he remained simply ‘D. L.’ though occasionally he intimated that he might consider ‘Dan’ as a first name.) At the James house Chaplin met D. L.’s son Dan, who was then twenty-six, an aspiring writer and ardent Marxist, and rather unsettled: ‘My writing was getting nowhere; I was separating from my wife; and I was just then thinking of going to New York.’⁶ They met on several occasions and Dan would hold forth about films and the war against Fascism. Chaplin in turn outlined his ideas for a Hitler film.

When Chaplin returned from Pebble Beach to Hollywood at the end of the summer, Dan James took a chance and wrote to him saying that he was enthusiastic about the idea of the Hitler film, and would be very happy to be able to work on it in any capacity. ‘I went on packing my bags for the East, though.’ Somewhat to his surprise a telephone call came from the Chaplin studio a few days later, and he was invited to call and see Alf Reeves. Reeves warned him that Chaplin was very ‘changeable’, but that he liked him and was prepared to employ him on a salary of $80 a week, and to put him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel until he could find somewhere to live.

My first evening he took me to Giro’s Trocadero Oyster bar; then we dined and he told me the outline of the story. The next day I went up and started to make notes … I think Charlie took me on because of my height, because my family had a castle out here, and because he knew pretty quickly I was a declared Communist, so that my background and political preoccupations would keep me from selling him out for money.

This was presumably at the end of September 1938. The Jameses also knew John Steinbeck, whom Chaplin was eager to meet, and Dan James made the necessary arrangements. On 1 October, Dan accompanied Chaplin for a weekend at Steinbeck’s ranch at Los Gatos. He was impressed by Chaplin’s perspicuity: ‘Even then he said, “There’s a lot that’s phoney in Steinbeck,” and I think time has proved him right.’

For three months James reported daily to the house in Beverly Hills, where he would make notes as Chaplin discussed ideas for the plot and gags. From time to time he would go to the studio to dictate the notes to Kathleen Pryor: the first of these dictation sessions seems to have taken place on 26 October 1938. During these three months James was able to assess Chaplin’s own political thinking:

He did not read deeply, but he felt deeply everything that happened. The end of Modern Times, for instance, reflected perfectly the optimism of the New Deal period: already by 1934 and 1935 he had a sense of that. He had probably never read Marx, but his conception of the millionaire in City Lights is an exact image for Marx’s conception of the business cycle. Marx wrote of the madness of the business cycle once it began to roll, the veering from one extreme to another. Chaplin presents a magnificent metaphor. Whether he was aware of the social meaning of this I do not know, but he got it.

He had a sixth sense about a lot of things. In 1927 and 1928, for instance, he began to feel that the stock market was going mad, and he took everything he had and put it into Canadian gold.

Charlie called himself an anarchist. He was always fascinated with people of the left. One of the people he wanted to meet was Harry Bridges of the Longshoremen’s Union. I fixed up a meeting, and they took to each other immediately. Chaplin talked about the beauty of labor, and described how in the islands he had heard the fishermen sing as they went out in their boats. Harry said, ‘I think you would have found that it was the old men on the shore, the ones who had given up going to sea, who did the singing.’

Whatever his exact politics, Charlie had a position of revolt against wealth and stuffiness. He had a real feeling for the underdog … He was certainly a libertarian. He saw Stalin as a dangerous dictator very early, and Bob [Meltzer] and I had difficulty getting him to leave Stalin out of the last speech in The Great Dictator. He was horrified by the Soviet–German pact.

His description of himself as an anarchist is as good as any. He believed in human freedom and human dignity. He hated and suspected the machine, even though it was the motion picture machine that gave him his life. I would say that he was anti-capitalist, anti-organization. And dammit, that’s the way people ought to be.

When it came to Hitler it is easy to say, with hindsight, that Chaplin made too light of him. You have to remember that the film was conceived before Munich, and that Chaplin had undoubtedly had it in his head a couple of years before that. And the thought then was that this monster was not so awe-inspiring as he appeared. He was a big phoney, and had to be shown up as such. Of course by the time the film appeared, France had fallen and we knew much more; so that a lot of the comedy had lost its point.

The Great Dictator marked an inevitable revolution in Chaplin’s working methods. This was to be his first film with real dialogue, and for the first time he was to begin a picture with a complete script. The old method had been to work out each sequence in turn, alternating periods of story preparation with shooting – changing, selecting and discarding ideas as the work proceeded. Now these processes had to be transferred to the preparatory period, the work on a definitive script. The notes which Dan James periodically dictated to Miss Pryor reveal the metamorphoses of the story during this preparatory work.

The original and basic premise was the physical resemblance of the Dictator and the little Jewish barber, which makes it possible for the barber to take the Dictator’s place at the climax of the story. This was an idea which Chaplin had retrieved – no doubt with Sydney’s agreement – from a forgotten film, King, Queen, Joker, which Sydney had written and directed for Paramount-Famous Players in 1921. In this, Sydney himself played the dual role of the King of Coronia and a jocular barber. When the king refuses his subjects’ demand for a trade charter, he is kidnapped by revolutionaries, who substitute the barber, the king’s double, on the throne. The barber enjoys his new role until the king escapes, now chastened and ready to grant the reforms the plotters have demanded. Any doubt that Chaplin was inspired by this film is dispelled by the close resemblance between the scene in The Great Dictator in which Chaplin, as the somewhat unhinged barber, demonically shaves an alarmed customer to the strains of Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’, and an almost identical scene performed by Sydney in King, Queen, Joker. Although the Sydney Chaplin film is lost, several sequences, including this, survived in the Chaplin Studio vaults.⁷

All the early treatments of the story begin with the return of Jewish soldiers, mostly maimed, from the war to the ghetto. They are all welcomed back by wives and families, except ‘the little Jew’ (clearly returning from service in Shoulder Arms). He ‘is alone walking down the ghetto street. In his hunger for companionship he embraces a lamppost.’

One early idea was for a flophouse sequence which

can be used for the setting of our inflation material. The little Jew will return to pay his bill. The sign will read ‘Beds, $1,000,000 a night – baths $500,000.’ Someone will send out for a package of cigarettes: ‘You’ll have to carry the money yourself,’ or perhaps the little Jew goes out balancing a huge basket of currency on his head. $10,000,000 for cigars. The tobacco dealer insists that the money be counted. It is all in $1.00 bills.

Never willing to waste a good comedy idea, Chaplin planned to use the flea circus routine, just as it appears in The Professor, for this scene. It stayed in through several successive treatments, but was finally abandoned. Having been frustrated in his efforts to introduce the sequence into The Circus and The Great Dictator, he would eventually manage to squeeze it, in rudimentary form at least, into Limelight. Quite early in his preparation, Chaplin conceived the idea of the two rival dictators competing to upstage one another. He was to abandon an idea for the Great Dictator’s wife, a role intended for the famous Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice. A scene sketched out, with a lot of revision in Dan James’s handwriting, indicates the kind of relationship Chaplin had in mind, and suggests that it might have encountered serious problems with the Breen Office⁸ and other censorship groups:

Scene: Mrs Hinkle alone – boredom and sex starvation with Freudian fruit symbols. Enter Hinkle from speech. She’s mad at him – orders him about. He’s preoccupied about matters of State.

Mrs: I’m a woman. I need affection, and all you think about is the State! THE STATE! What kind of state do you think I’m in?

Hinkle: You’ve made me come to myself. I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I wonder, (good old melo)

Mrs: Life is so short and these moments are so rare … Remember, Hinkle, I did everything for you. I even had an operation … on my nose. If you don’t pay more attention to me I’ll tell the whole world I’m Jewish!

Hinkle: Shhh!

Fanny [sic]: And I’m not so sure you aren’t Jewish, too. We’re having gefullte fish for dinner.

Hinkle: Quiet! Quiet!

Fanny: Last night I dreamt about blimps.

Hinkle: Blimps?

Fanny: Yes, I dreamt we captured Paris in a big blimp and we went right through the Arc de Triomphe. And then I dreamed about a city all full of Washington monuments. (She presses grapes in his mouth, plays with a banana)

By 13 December 1938 Chaplin had decided on much of the story, including the ending. Charlie and the father of the Girl from the ghetto with whom he has fallen in love are put in a concentration camp. They escape, and on the road run into Hinkle’s troops, preparing to invade the neighbouring country of Ostrich. The general in command mistakes Charlie for Hinkle. Hinkle himself, out shooting ducks while trying to make up his mind about the invasion, is meanwhile mistaken for Charlie and thrown into prison.

Charlie and the Girl’s father are carried along on the invasion of Ostrich and finally find themselves in the palace square of Vanilla, the capital:

Hinkle’s soldiers are drawn up before the platform from which the conqueror is about to speak. Charlie walks out on it. He can’t say a word. The Girl’s father is at his shoulder. ‘You’ve got to talk now! It’s our only chance! For God’s sake, say something.’ Herring (Hinkle’s Prime Minister) first addresses the crowd – and through microphones the whole world, which is listening in. He calls for an end to democracies. He introduces Hinkle, the new conqueror who must be obeyed or else. In the crowd we show dozens of Ostrich patriots ready to kill Hinkle. Charlie steps forward. He begins slowly – scared to death. But his words give him power. As he goes on, the clown turns into the prophet.

By the middle of January 1939 Chaplin clearly felt confident with his story, though it was to undergo much subsequent revision. Dan James was assigned to adapt it into a dramatic composition in five acts and an epilogue, which was then registered for copyright. When copyright was also sought in the title The Dictator, it was discovered that this was already owned by Paramount Pictures and the estate of Richard Harding Davies, who were unwilling to relinquish it. In June, therefore, the title The Great Dictator was registered, although Chaplin was not entirely convinced that it was right and registered as alternatives The Two Dictators, Dictamania and Dictator of Ptomania.

After 16 January Dan James no longer went to the Beverly Hills house, since Chaplin himself was now working at the studio, where he could supervise preparations for shooting. The stage was being sound-proofed; contracts had to be negotiated with outside organizations like RCA, who were to be responsible for the sound; and work was already in hand on miniatures for special effects. The daily script conferences now took place in Chaplin’s bungalow on the lot. On 21 January Sydney returned to work at the studio for the first time in almost twenty years: in view of conditions in Europe, he and his new French wife, Gypsy, had decided that America was the safer option. The conferences were now augmented, as Sydney and Henry Bergman joined Chaplin and Dan James, who recalled:

I don’t remember Henry contributing anything to the meetings except enthusiasm and laughter – and that was very important. Sydney, though, was immensely ingenious with gags. Very few of them had any relevance to what we were doing, but that didn’t matter. It was stimulating. A bad gag is always a challenge to do better …

Sydney was always asking me to remind Charlie how much it was all costing, and that we didn’t need all those extras and things, and that it wasn’t necessary to do so much overtime. He was very much the older brother. You would never have taken them for brothers though – they seemed so different. I think Charlie had outgrown Sydney. Sydney would rarely go to Charlie’s parties, with all his smart intellectual friends … If you saw Sydney you would never even have taken him for an actor …

By the late summer of 1939, when the script was finished and Chaplin was ready to start shooting, he was able to reassure Sydney: ‘This time, Syd, I have the script totally visualized. I know where every close-up comes.’ ‘Of course,’ said Dan James, ‘it didn’t work out quite like that.’

During the weeks of preparation, Chaplin ran films for the staff in the studio projection room, among them Shoulder Arms and the mysterious The Professor. He also screened all the newsreels of Hitler on which he could lay hands. He regularly returned to a particular sequence showing Hitler at the signing of the French surrender. As Hitler left the railway carriage, he seemed to do a little dance. Chaplin would watch the scene with fascination, exclaiming, ‘Oh, you bastard, you son-of-a-bitch, you swine. I know what’s in your mind.’ According to Tim Durant, ‘He said, “this guy is one of the greatest actors I’ve ever seen” … Charlie admired his acting. He really did.’ Dan James commented forty-five years later, ‘Of course he had in himself some of the qualities that Hitler had. He dominated his world. He created his world. And Chaplin’s world was not a democracy either. Charlie was the dictator of all those things.’

The script was finally completed by 1 September, and must be one of the most elaborate ever written for a Hollywood film. It runs to the extraordinary length of almost 300 pages (the average feature film script varies from 100 to 150 pages). It was divided into twenty-five sections, each designated by a letter of the alphabet and separately paginated; throughout shooting every take was identified by the letter and number of the relevant script page. Despite Dan James’s doubts about Chaplin’s assertion that everything was visualized, the system seems, to judge from the shooting records, to have served pretty well in the course of a very complicated production.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1939 Chaplin was collecting his crew around him. Henry Bergman was nominated ‘coordinator’. Dan James was joined by two more assistant directors. One was Chaplin’s half-brother Wheeler Dryden, who arrived at La Brea in March, overjoyed to be given a job on Chaplin’s permanent studio staff. Wheeler had continued to pick up a living as an actor and in 1923 had had a play, Suspicion, co-written with George Appell, produced at the Egan Theatre in Los Angeles. Sydney evidently had a high enough regard for him in the later 1920s to consider taking him on as assistant in his abortive British production venture. He was to remain at the studio until Chaplin’s departure from the United States in 1952. A slight man, Wheeler retained the air and diction of an old-style stage actor. Though he adored Chaplin, Wheeler could often madden him as well as the rest of the studio staff with his finicky attention to detail.

The amusing and devil-may-care Robert Meltzer, like James an avowed Communist, was in striking contrast to the solemn and nervy Wheeler. He had also been recruited in Pebble Beach. During the summer there, the gossip writers had linked Chaplin’s name with several women, notably the sugar heiress Geraldine Spreckels and a striking young red-headed actress called Dorothy Comingore, whom Chaplin saw on stage in Carmel. Dorothy Comingore was then living with Bob Meltzer, and when Chaplin convinced her that she should try her luck in Los Angeles, Meltzer came too. In the end it was Meltzer who worked for Chaplin and not Miss Comingore, who instead joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and made her most striking impact as Susan Alexander – the role transparently based on Marion Davies – in Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). After The Great Dictator, Meltzer himself was to work briefly with Welles. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1941 he volunteered for service with the paratroops and died in action (exclaiming ‘This is the best darn’ football match I ever had’) in Normandy. Meltzer wanted to be a writer but Dan James recalled that ‘nothing he wrote ever quite came off. He was witty, funny – but nothing much ended up on paper.’

Chaplin’s staff were astonished when Chaplin engaged Karl Struss as director of photography. After twenty-three years as Chaplin’s senior cameraman, Rollie Totheroh felt this was a cruel blow and could never afterwards completely forgive his beloved boss. Chaplin had grown dissatisfied with Rollie’s camerawork for reasons which were never quite clear. According to Dan James,

He was having a great war with all the technical people … He wasn’t satisfied with what Rollie had been giving him; but then he felt that Karl wasn’t giving him enough light. He was getting in tree branches and things, to achieve ‘mood’. It might have been ‘mood’, but it wasn’t what Chaplin wanted.

The problem for a director making only one film every four or five years was that conditions in Hollywood changed so fast. Each time that Chaplin started on a fresh film he found himself bedevilled by new technical people whom he neither understood nor needed. On The Great Dictator he had a running feud with the script girl – a role hitherto unknown on a Chaplin film.

He was always fighting against what he called ‘chi-chi’ – over-attention to detail of make-up, costumes and such. The script girl would stop him in a scene and say, ‘But Mr Chaplin, last time you held your arm this way.’ He would yell, and say ‘****! Who cares? If they’re going to watch my hand we might as well throw the whole thing out of the window.’

Then one day in the cutting room he noticed that Paulette entered a door and came through the other side wearing a completely different dress. He was triumphant. So much for the script girl!⁹

The Great Dictator was to make particular demands on the wardrobe department and Chaplin engaged Paul (Ted) Tetrick, who had been around Hollywood since the 1920s working at various times in movies, real estate and the clothing business. Tetrick, useful in many different aspects of production, was to work on both Chaplin’s subsequent American films. Winifred Ritchie, the widow of Billie Ritchie, who had learned her skill in making trick costumes back in the Karno days and had long been indispensable on Chaplin productions, was again employed on The Great Dictator.

The role of Hannah was intended for Paulette, who reported for work at the studio on 29 July. She and Chaplin had spent a good deal of the previous year apart. While he went to Pebble Beach in the early half of 1938, Paulette flew to Florida. During most of the rest of the year she was kept busy with film roles, while he stayed away from his studio. Already in March, while hardly finished with marriage rumours, the newspapers were talking of impending divorce. Paulette’s contract with the Chaplin studio expired on 31 March 1938 and she had sought an earlier release to sign with the Myron Selznick agency. She was now hired for The Great Dictator at $2500 a week; Chaplin was furious when she brought her agent (probably Selznick himself) to demand bigger billing.

She and Chaplin continued to live together in the Summit Drive house throughout the production of the film. As Chaplin nicely expressed it, ‘Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married.’ To the Chaplin sons, now mischievous early teenagers, and to casual acquaintances, their relationship seemed much as before. At the studio, however, the staff were aware of the change. Dan James remembers, ‘You belonged to the Paulette faction or to the Charlie faction. You couldn’t be both.’ Sometimes, he felt, the strain showed when Chaplin and Paulette were working together.

There was some anger on both sides. But he worked very hard with her. Sometimes he would make twenty-five or thirty takes. He would stand in her place on the set and try and give her the tone and the gestures. It was a method he had been able to use in silent films: it could not work so well with a talking picture.

The final stencilled copies of the script were completed on Sunday, 3 September 1939 – the day that Britain declared war on Germany. Three days later Chaplin began to rehearse, and on 9 September shooting began on the first ghetto sequence. Filming was to continue with hardly a day’s break apart from (most weeks) Sundays until the end of March 1940. By that time Chaplin would have shot most of the 477,440 feet of film which were eventually to be exposed. The length of the finished picture was 11,628 feet.

It is interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising, to discover that Chaplin kept the shooting of his two roles quite distinct. First, until the end of October, he worked on the scenes of the ghetto, in the character of the barber. With the bulk of those completed, November was spent on more complicated action and location scenes, like the war scenes, particularly those involving Reginald Gardiner and the crashed plane. Chaplin had devised some very funny sequences with the aeroplane. Taking over the controls, Charlie manages to turn it upside down without either himself or his companion (Gardiner) being aware of it. They only notice with some concern that the sun is shining up from below them, that a watch released from a pocket leaps (apparently) into the air and sways there on its taut chain, and that they are passed by flocks of upside-down seagulls. Reginald Gardiner suffered much more than Chaplin from the experience of being strapped upside down, and only managed his lines and air of insouciance with great effort.

There were interludes and distractions in the work at the studio that November. Not all were welcome: the plagiarism suit brought by Michael Kustoff on account of Modern Times came to trial before Federal Judge McCormick. Chaplin himself was in court on 18 November when Kustoff’s case was thrown out. More welcome was the arrival of another of Chaplin’s English relatives. Betty Chaplin was the elder daughter of Cousin Aubrey and had kept in touch with Sydney during her childhood. Now twenty-three, her marriage had broken down and she welcomed the chance to leave England, just then in the period of the ‘phoney war’. She was lucky to get onto the last passenger ship to leave for America, with no clothes, money or passport, but with a diplomatic visa obtained from Joseph Kennedy, then US Ambassador in London.

She arrived on 11 November 1939. That day, with the Kustoff hearings in progress, Chaplin had decided to change the entire set and lighting for the roof-top escape in The Great Dictator, and no one from the studio had time to meet Betty off the Superchief. Hal Roach’s daughter Maggie stepped in to collect her from the railway station, but on arrival at the studio, already nervous, she was warned that Chaplin was in a very difficult mood. She was heartened to find Wyn Ritchie, whom she knew from earlier visits to Hollywood. He joined her for a cup of coffee with Ted Tetrick, whom Wyn introduced as ‘the breaker of all the hearts of Hollywood’.

Betty broke her own share of hearts among the studio staff, but her first and final choice was Ted Tetrick, whom she was to marry eight years later. Chaplin, taking his responsibility for his young half-cousin seriously, regularly complained because the marriage was so long delayed. He was also persistent in urging Betty to take American citizenship. When she countered that he had never done so himself, he would only reply that he was too old. (Betty became an American citizen on 9 December 1949.)

On 15 November 1939, Douglas Fairbanks and his new wife Sylvia, the former Lady Ashley, visited the location in Laurel Canyon where Chaplin was filming. Chaplin thought he looked older and stouter, but he was still as full of enthusiasm. He had always been Chaplin’s favourite audience and, as so many times before, Chaplin showed Fairbanks his sets and expounded his plans. Although he was filming in the barber’s concentration camp costume, Chaplin put on his Hynkel uniform to show his visitors and, wearing it, was photographed with them. They all lunched together.

It was the last time he saw the man whom he later said had been his only close friend. At four o’clock in the morning of 12 December, Douglas Fairbanks Junior telephoned Chaplin to tell him that his father had died just over three hours earlier, in his sleep. There was no shooting at the Chaplin studio on the day of his funeral, 15 December. ‘It was a terrible shock,’ wrote Chaplin, ‘for he belonged so much to life … I have missed his delightful friendship.’¹⁰

As December arrived Chaplin began his Hynkel scenes. The supreme actor, Chaplin always became subsumed into the role he was playing, as colleagues throughout his career have testified. When, for the first time, he adopted the uniform and role of an autocratic and villainous character, even he was momentarily disconcerted by the effect. Reginald Gardiner remembered that when Chaplin first appeared on the set in his Hynkel uniform, he was noticeably more cool and abrupt than when he had been playing the Jewish barber. Gardiner recalled further that when he was driving with Chaplin – already in uniform – to a new location, Chaplin suddenly became uncharacteristically abusive about the driver of a car that was obstructing them. He quickly recovered himself and recalled with laughter an earlier discussion about the false sense of superiority a uniform can produce. ‘Just because I’m dressed up in this darned thing I go and do a thing like that.’

Although work on The Great Dictator proceeded on a much tighter schedule and more precise plan than any previous Chaplin film, there was no fixed daily routine in the studio. Much, of course, depended upon Chaplin’s own somewhat unpredictable time of arrival, although for the first time he appears to have delegated considerable responsibility for preparation and in some cases shooting to his assistants. Two daily reports from December give some idea of the way the day might go at the Chaplin studios during this period.

December 16

Rehearsals 9 a. m. on stage I. Hynkel’s office with Gilbert, Daniell, 3 girls, 2 guards. Rehearsed all scenes in office – mapped out new business. Lunch 12.45–1.45. Lining up on set till 3 p. m. when C. C. arrived on set. He then asked for a secretary to work in F5 (which was not according to plan in a. m.). Then rehearsed until 4p. m. Male secretary arrived on set 4.15 ready. C. C. decided to continue to use guard, 1st shot 4 p. m. Finished at 7.10 p. m.

The code ‘F5’ is the sequence and page reference from the script – ‘F’ was the first scene in Hynkel’s palace. The ‘Male secretary’ is of course a character in the film. In the final three hours of this day, 2,780 feet of film (about thirty minutes’ running time) were exposed.

December 30

Rushes 8.20 a. m. Shooting 9.30 a. m. C. C. came on set made minor changes. Returned on set made up at 11 a. m. 1st shot 11.55 a. m. Lunch 1.20–2.20. 1st shot 3 p. m. Continued scenes in Banquet Room till 7.20 p. m. when company finished.

That day 3,570 feet of film (almost forty minutes’ running time) were shot.

Dan James recalls going on location in the San Fernando Valley to film the rally scenes in which Chaplin, spouting wild Teutonic gibberish, miraculously caricatures Hitler’s oratorical style. The inspired concoction of sibilants and gutturals seems to have been improvised; there is hardly a hint in the script of the sounds Chaplin would produce.

We must have gone back to that scene a dozen times. The first time was in San Fernando Valley, with all the extras standing there in front of him. He said, ‘Just keep the cameras rolling.’ He would keep up that gibberish talk for 700 feet of film.

The temperatures were over 100, but he would go on interminably, it seemed, and then in between he would amuse the extras by doing scenes from Sherlock Holmes or demonstrating pratfalls. At the end of the day he would be deadly gray, sweating, exhausted, with a towel wrapped around his neck. He would collapse into his car, and you would think, ‘My God, he’ll never be back tomorrow.’ But he was.

In the end we reshot most of the scene in the studio, and then it wasn’t possible to match the light quality, so I think that what we used was mostly the studio stuff. But some of the shots made on that outdoor lot were breathtaking.

Just before Christmas, Chaplin shot the scene which remains the most haunting and the most inspired of the film: Hynkel’s ballet with the terrestrial globe. The first hint of a symbolic scene of this sort is a random story note dating from 15 February 1939:

SCENE WITH MAP: cutting it up to suit himself, cutting off bits of countries with a pair of scissors.

The dance with the globe was to go far beyond this elementary notion. While the gibberish speech appears so precise and planned that it is astonishing to discover that it was improvised, the dance with the globe seems to soar so freely in its inspiration that it is hard to imagine that it could be written down. Yet it was. In the complete version of the script, the description of Chaplin’s pas seul occupies four pages, opening,

HYNKEL GOES TO THE GLOBE – and caresses it – trance-like. Soft strains of Peer Gynt waft into the room. Hynkel picks up the globe, bumps it into the air with his left wrist. It floats like a balloon and drops back into his hands. He bumps it with his right wrist and catches it. He dominates the world – kicks it viciously away. Sees himself in the mirror – plays God! Beckons, the world floats into his hand. Then he bumps it high in the air with his right wrist. He leaps up (on wire), catches the globe and brings it down …

Chaplin continued to develop his ideas for the scene (the Prelude to Lohengrin eventually seemed more appropriate and replaced Peer Gynt), and by December a new version of the libretto had been substituted in the script. It was now headed ‘Dance Routine’ and is arranged in ten movements.

I. Hynkel moves hypnotically toward the globe (one hand on hip – one outstretched). He lifts it from its stand. There is a moment of magical concentration. The globe becomes a balloon. Hynkel bounces it from wrist to wrist and off the top of his head. He finds he can do what he likes with it. The world is his oyster. He laughs ecstatically as he plays with it with nonchalance.

II. Now he shows his power. He grips the globe, taps his foot. He changes his grip so that his right hand is above – his left hand underneath.

III. Then he gets a transition – becomes sensuous about the world. It nearly gets away from him.

IV. In revenge he grabs it angrily, kicks it away viciously.

V. It returns to him. Gratified by his manifest power over it, Hynkel plays nonchalantly with the globe again – with silly gestures. Kicks it away with a comedy kick.

VI. He catches the globe – authoritatively taps it from wrist to wrist as he stands before his desk.

VII. Gracefully he leans back over the desk and gets very Greek about the whole thing. He bounces the globe from toe to head to rear. He’s carried away with the beauty of it.

VIII. He gets to his feet on the far side of the desk – becomes mystic about the world, tosses it high in the air, leaps after it to the desk top where he catches it.

IX. Again he tosses it up, leaps from the desk to get it (slow motion).

X. He catches it roughly (anger business). Laughs demonically. The globe pops. He picks up the skin forlornly and bursts into tears.

The particular attention that Chaplin was to give to the balloon dance indicates that he was well aware that it would remain one of his great virtuoso scenes. He spent three days (21, 22 and 23 December) on the main shooting, and then made some retakes on 6 January. The first three days of February 1940 seem to have been entirely taken up with running and rerunning the material, and on 6 February and again on 11 February Chaplin made further retakes.

A vaudeville artist called Charles De Haven (apparently unrelated to Chaplin’s collaborator, Carter De Haven) later claimed that the globe routine was a plagiarism of his own stage act. Any doubt, however, was finally put to rest when Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, preparing their Unknown Chaplin documentary series, unearthed some forgotten home movies of a party at Pickfair sometime in the early 1920s. Chaplin, in classical Grecian costume and crowned with a laurel wreath, performs a dance with a balloon which is the unmistakable prototype for The Great Dictator. No doubt Chaplin was remembering his party trick of nearly twenty years before when he wrote in the script description of the globe ballet, ‘Then he slides to the table top to perform a series of Greek postures’ (first version) and ‘Gracefully he leans back over the desk and gets very Greek about the whole thing.’

In January 1940, Jack Oakie joined the cast to play Benzino Napaloni, the Dictator of Bacteria. When Chaplin first proposed the role to him, Oakie questioned the suitability of casting an Irish-Scottish American in a caricature of Mussolini. What, asked Chaplin, would be funny about an Italian playing Mussolini? Nevertheless Chaplin perceived a problem when he discovered that Oakie was dieting to lose weight. According to Charles Chaplin Junior, Chaplin brought his own cook, George, to the studio and had him tempt Oakie with the richest and most fattening dishes he could devise. When he found his strategy was succeeding, and that Oakie was increasingly growing to resemble Mussolini in corpulence, he cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Muscles’.¹¹

Charles Junior considered that ‘one of the pleasantest things about the new film was the affable relationship between Dad and Jack Oakie. Jack has a tough hide and was able to take Dad’s drive in stride. Dad, on his part, has always had great admiration for Jack.’¹² Others on the set observed that working in his scenes with Oakie brought out a competitive spirit in Chaplin. It was not jealousy: rationally Chaplin knew that his supremacy was unassailable. Rather, it was Chaplin’s legacy from the Karno and Keystone training: the essential and driving motive for a comedian must always be to outdo the rest. The script for The Great Dictator often gave the better comedy routines to Oakie. Chaplin’s professional instinct still drove him to top it with his own comedy. He would sense the reaction of the unit, and he played the comic game with the same intensity as he played tennis. As with tennis, he did not like to lose: finishing a scene in which he felt that Oakie had scored the biggest laughs from the bystanders, he could hardly conceal his irritation. Charles Junior, a very reliable witness, despite his youth at the time, recalled one day when Oakie had tried every trick he knew to do the impossible and steal a scene from Chaplin. In the middle of the scene, Chaplin grinned and offered advice: ‘If you really want to steal a scene from me, you son-of-a-bitch, just look straight into the camera. That’ll do it every time.’¹³

Chaplin undoubtedly found these duels of comedy nostalgic and stimulating. He was less happy with some of his actors from the legitimate theatre. In particular, he found it very hard to work against Henry Daniell’s measured timing. ‘He developed a hatred for Daniell,’ recalls Dan James.

He really thought Daniell was trying to sabotage him. The trouble was that he had a respect for Daniell because he was a real stage actor, and couldn’t bring himself to explain what was wrong. Poor Daniell knew that Chaplin was not pleased with him, but he never understood why. On the other hand he was crazy about Reggie Gardiner, though once he had got him, he never really gave Reggie any funny stuff.

By the middle of February practically all the studio scenes had been shot and Chaplin moved out onto location to shoot the First World War scenes for the opening of the film and the sequence of Hynkel being arrested while out duck shooting, filmed at Malibu Lake. The war scenes involved the series of gags with Chaplin and the enormous Big Bertha gun, and for one day’s shooting the Chaplin children were taken to watch. Fourteen-year-old Sydney was so overcome with mirth at his father’s antics following the explosion of the gun that he laughed aloud. When he discovered who had wrecked the sound take, Chaplin flew at him in fury, saying ‘Do you know your laugh just cost me fifteen thousand dollars?’

‘In a twinkling, from being the funniest man alive, Dad had become the most furious.’ The two boys feared some awful retribution; but then Chaplin began to laugh, and proudly called out to the crew, ‘Even my own son thinks I’m funny.’ To Sydney he added, ‘Well, it was fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of laugh, but if you appreciated it that much, it’s all right … Just don’t let it happen again, son.’¹⁴

One series of scenes shot during this period was destined never to be seen. Chaplin’s first idea for the final scene of the speech, in which (in the words of the early treatment) ‘the clown turns into the prophet’, was inordinately ambitious. He intended the speech to be laid over scenes supposed to take place in Spain, China, a German street and a Jewish ghetto in Germany. As Chaplin’s speech came into their consciousness, a Spanish firing squad would throw down their arms; a Japanese bomber pilot would be overcome by wonder, and instead of bombs, toys on parachutes would rain down on the Chinese children below; a parade of goose-stepping German soldiers would break into waltz-time; and a Nazi stormtrooper would risk his life to save a little Jewish girl from an oncoming car. A couple of days were actually spent in shooting some material for the sequence, but it was discarded.

By the end of March 1940, the main shooting was all finished, the labourers were already beginning to clear the studio, and Chaplin had a rough-cut of the film ready to show to a few friends such as Constance Collier in early April. The climactic scene, the final speech made by the little barber who has been mistaken for the dictator, remained to be shot. Moreover, Chaplin was to polish and tinker with the film more than with any other he had made. During the next six months he would suddenly decide to put up a set again; and he was still doing retakes of the ghetto scenes in late September, after he had already previewed the film. Redubbing of the sound went on practically until the première on 15 October 1940.

From April to June, while working on the editing of the film, Chaplin laboured over the text of his big speech. His two young Marxist assistants were of no help to him:

Bob and I said to him, ‘Couldn’t you just say some simple little thing?’ But Charlie wanted to make some great statement to the world. When he finally came to shoot it, we were exiled from the set. He said, ‘I can’t do it with you two there. I can feel your hostility.’¹⁵

The utopian idealism and unashamed emotionalism of the speech evidently offended their Communist orthodoxy. Others were anxious about the speech on more pragmatic grounds. Tim Durant remembered,

He made a speech about humanity, and there was a great argument about that … that it did not belong … in the picture. It was unaesthetic. It was wrong to have Charlie go out there and propagandize … The film salesmen said, ‘You’ll lose a million dollars … for doing that’ and he said, ‘Well I don’t care if it’s five million. I’m gonna do it.’ So he did, you know, and of course it did cost him quite a bit.¹⁶

Chaplin’s determination was not swayed. On 24 June he recorded the speech, which in its final screen form runs six minutes. It has remained one of the most controversial passages in all his works, but today Chaplin’s judgement seems correct. Simply and succinctly the speech sums up his fears and his hopes for a world in the throes of its most terrible war:

The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate – has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.¹⁷

Chaplin’s critics, from left and right, accused him of cliché and truism. The most striking aspect of the speech, though, is that, in the twenty-first century, not one phrase of it has dated or lost its force, even if the optimism of the final lines (‘We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world …!’) can hardly be said to have been justified.

Music, obviously, played a less important role in The Great Dictator than in Chaplin’s previous sound films; the score was completed in a bare three weeks. On this occasion Chaplin’s musical collaborator was Meredith Willson. Many of the music sessions took place at Chaplin’s house, and Charles Junior was an interested observer. The musicians, he noted, were really musical secretaries, working to Chaplin’s dictation. He would hum a tune or play it on the piano, and the musicians would take it down and play it back for his approval. It might take several tries before the tune gave him complete satisfaction. He had very clear ideas on the scoring and liked to describe what he wanted by reference to a composer or an instrumental label: ‘We should make this Wagnerian,’ he would say, or, ‘This part should be more Chopin. Let’s make this light and airy, a lot of violins. I think we could use an oboe effect in this passage.’ Often the musicians were startled by the unorthodox timing Chaplin would demand to suit a special piece of action, but

Dad’s dramatic instinct as it related to music was brilliant … The musicians turned gray and were on the verge of nervous breakdown by the time it was over, but whatever they suffered they couldn’t say that working with Dad was ever dull. He gave them a free performance at every session, because he didn’t just hum or sing, or knock out a tune on the piano. He couldn’t stay quiet that long. He would start gesturing with the music, acting out the parts of the various people in the scene he was working on, but caricaturing their movements to evoke a total response in himself. At those times his acting was closer than ever to ballet.¹⁸

Many more weeks of retakes, cutting and recutting, recording and re-recording, predubbing, dubbing and redubbing followed, until finally on 1 September a complete print of the picture was ready. The first audience that Sunday afternoon consisted of Paulette, Mr and Mrs King Vidor, Mr and Mrs Lewis Milestone, the three assistants – James, Meltzer and Wheeler Dryden – and Steve Pallos, who was invited as Alexander Korda’s representative. Three days later, after further changes (mainly restoration of the conspiracy sequence, which he had previously decided to cut), the picture was shown to the United Artists representative. Joseph Breen, the film industry censor, also saw the film: subsequently he was to ask for the deletion of the word ‘lousy’ from the dialogue.

Still anxious, Chaplin decided on a series of sneak previews. The first was at the Riverside Theatre on 5 September, and was attended by most of the staff. Noting the reaction, Chaplin embarked on some recutting to speed up the picture, and ordered the rebuilding of the ghetto street set for retakes. Wheeler Dryden had by this time taken over the job of writing the daily studio reports. One day he notes, ‘The music of the newly edited “Conspiracy” sequence was a difficult task, but Mr Chaplin stuck to it all day.’ His no less characteristic comment on a second sneak preview at the UA Theatre, Long Beach, on 20 September runs, ‘The reaction accorded to the production showed unmistakably that the changes Mr Chaplin has made since the first “Sneak Preview” have improved the picture immeasurably.’ All the same Chaplin decided on more retakes, and next day poor Wheeler recorded, ‘Wheeler Dryden spent whole day and several hours after dinner locating actors needed.’

Not until the end of September was Chaplin sufficiently satisfied to order the final dubbing of the picture. On the evening of 3 October he invited a select group of guests to see the finished work. They were James Roosevelt, Patricia Morison, Gene Tierney, Mrs Rockwell Kent, Anita Loos, the Aldous Huxleys, the John Steinbecks and the Lewis Milestones. Tim Durant, Dan James and Robert Meltzer also attended.

Between this showing and the press previews, which took place eleven days later at the Carthay Circle Theatre, Los Angeles, and the Astor Theatre, New York, Chaplin made still further changes to the sound. They were, Wheeler noted, ‘just minor changes, but important ones’.

For the first time since work began on the film, Chaplin permitted himself to relax. Wheeler’s painstaking notes sometimes recorded social occasions:

September 25

4.30. Countess of Jersey (Virginia Cherrill) visited C. C. in cutting room, looked at some scenes and drove him home from studio at 6.08.

October 1

At 6.45 p. m. Tim Durant, a friend of Mr Chaplin’s arrived at stu’o. Shortly after Mr C. left the sound stage, dressed in clothes brought from his home by his valet, and at 7.30 p. m. Mr C. was driven from studio to attend social engagement. He drove out of studio in Tim Durant’s car.

October 2

Lunch was called at 1.15 p. m., after which, at 3.43 p. m., Mr C. was driven by Jack Kneymeyer, in the latter’s automobile, to Mr C.’s residence, where he and Kneymeyer played a game of tennis.

October 3

Heard remainder of dubbed tracks; gave instructions for few changes. Afternoon: tennis with Jack Kneymeyer.

Chaplin was understandably nervous about the reception of The Great Dictator. The rest of Hollywood had discreetly avoided making overt anti-Nazi films. A Gallup poll at the time of the outbreak of war in Europe showed 96 per cent opposition to America’s entry into the war: the years since the Depression had fostered a fiercely isolationist spirit. Moreover, the quantity of threatening letters Chaplin received testified to the strength of pro-Fascist feeling in the United States. He seriously discussed with Harry Bridges of the Longshoremen’s Union having some of his men at the opening in case of a pro-Nazi demonstration.

Chaplin gambled that he was likely to get a more sympathetic press in New York than on the West Coast. He therefore decided to present the world première in New York on 15 October, with simultaneous press previews in New York and Los Angeles the day before. Favouring the East in this way was to rebound badly. When he eventually returned to Hollywood after an absence of almost four months in the East, he invited a group of the local press people to a conference at the house. He quickly realized how mortal was the offence he had committed: the press men even refused a drink. ‘You left here ignoring the press,’ they told him, ‘and we don’t like it.’ They were subsequently to punish him for it.

The American critics were on the whole guarded. Generally they admired the audacity of the undertaking and the sustained brilliance of the comedy, though Paul Goodman qualified a genuinely enthusiastic view with asides on ‘calamitous music’, ‘feeble dialogue’ and ‘persistent lapses in style’. Most, however, had an uneasy sense that things had gone beyond the point where Hitler could be made a simple buffoon and his stormtroopers Keystone Kops. On the other hand, Goodman found ‘the invective against Hynkel is to my taste all-powerful: disgust expressed by the basic tricks of low vaudeville, gibberish, belching, dirty words and radio static. You will not find the like outside of Juvenal … On the other hand the personal Hynkel is not the political Hitler.’ Goodman concluded that the film was ‘something different, and something better, than the “grandiose failure” of the worried reviewers’. Unlike them, he did not find the last speech in any way out of character, for ‘if this isn’t meant from the heart, we have been deceived for twenty-five years’.

Another particularly perceptive reviewer was Rudolph Arnheim, who wrote with the awareness of a recent fugitive from Hitler’s Germany:

Charles Chaplin is the only artist who holds the secret weapon of mortal laughter. Not the laugh of superficial gibing that self-complacently underrates the enemy and ignores the danger, but rather the profound laughter of the sage who despises physical violence, even the threat of death, because behind it he has discovered the spiritual weakness, stupidity, and falseness of his antagonist. Chaplin could have opened the eyes of a world enchained by the spell of force and material success. But instead of unmasking the common enemy, fascism, Chaplin unmasked a single man, ‘The Great Dictator’. And that is why I feel that this good film should have been better.¹⁹

In London, The Great Dictator opened on 16 December 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when Hitler was a very real and present enemy. The British seemed to delight in Chaplin’s ridicule, with none of the reserve felt by the Americans. Above all they loved the prime joke of the physical resemblance of Old Adolf and the funniest man in the world. The critic of the New Statesman and Nation called the film ‘the best heartener we could have, with war standing still or going for or against us’; and in the Spectator, Basil Wright found in it ‘undeniable greatness, both in its pure comedy and its bold contrast between the small people of the ghetto or the slums and the big people of the Fascist chancelleries, equating both in terms of fantasy and in terms of the adored Chaplin himself’.

The final speech, which the political right felt smacked of Communism and the left suspected of sentimentality, seemed not to embarrass the larger audience. It was widely quoted and reprinted. Chaplin’s old friend Rob Wagner devoted a page to it in the 16 November issue of his magazine Rob Wagner’s Script; Archie Mayo, mainly remembered as the director of The Petrified Forest, used it as his Christmas card for 1940, comparing it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and in England, the Communist Party put it out as a special pamphlet.