The Frame

Charlie Chaplin moved into the world of sound twelve years later than everyone else with this satirical take on Hitler. Not that there’s anything wrong with moving into the sound era twelve years late–his two sound-era silent films City Lights and Modern Times both rank among the world’s all-time greatest films and didn’t need sound in any way whatsoever (Modern Times did have some sound segments, if you want to get technical). In fact, I found it hard to imagine that anything could live up to his great silents, and this doesn’t quite, but it’s still very, very good. Charlie plays a Jewish man who served his country Tomania (read: Germany) in World War I, but was injured and got amnesia; when he is finally released from the hospital, he returns to his home, but discovers that Jews aren’t, um, well-liked in Tomania anymore, and he and fellow ghetto-dweller Paulette Goddard have to help each other out of various scrapes with the Tomanian soldiers. Charlie ALSO plays Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania, who dreams of world domination (whimsically portrayed in his joyful dance with a floating globe). Perhaps inevitably, the two end up being mistaken for each other. It was somewhat daring to make a film satirising and ridiculing Hitler this obviously in 1940, but Chaplin pulls it off. If you’re in a make-fun-of-Hitler sort of mood, watch this and Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be or Not To Be in a double feature.
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