The fears of a clown
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He thought about abandoning it. He agonised over its ending. And ultimately it
led to his downfall. Kevin Brownlow on the strange case of Charlie Chaplin and
his Hitler satire
Kevin Brownlow
Friday October 11, 2002
The Guardian
Hitler and Chaplin were born in the same week of the same month of the same
year - and, in public at least, they looked alike. Mussolini's chauffeur used
to claim that Hitler trimmed his first world war walrus moustache to resemble
Chaplin's; he wanted to look like the best-loved man in the world. This turned
out to be nonsense. Why would Hitler base his persona on a man he despised?
(Chaplin wasn't, as Hitler assumed, a Jew, but Hitler was seldom put off by
mere facts.)
The link between the two men becomes even more fascinating when you consider
that, a few years before Chaplin became famous as a tramp, Hitler was a tramp.
Living rough in the streets of Vienna, he was taken in by a men's home. They
may well have saved his life. The men's home was run partly by Jewish
charities.
The film The Tramp and the Dictator grew from an idea by Michael Kloft, a
director at Spiegel TV in Hamburg. He had seen the colour footage that Victoria
and Christopher Chaplin had discovered in the cellar of their father's home in
Vevey, Switzerland - footage that showed Chaplin at work on The Great Dictator.
I had also seen this footage and, while impressed by its high standard, I could
not see it sustaining an hour-long documentary.
Kloft suggested that we at Photoplay Productions co-produce with him not so
much a "making of" documentary, but a portrait of Chaplin and Hitler. This
struck me as the right approach. I have always been fascinated by this period,
and, like most of my generation who were children during the second world war,
I thought I knew it. But when I began researching the build-up to the war in
America, I found a world very different to the one we inhabit now.
In many ways, it surprised me that Nazism did not begin in America. The
conditions were all too ripe for it: the economic collapse following the Wall
Street crash of 1929, the widespread anti-Semitism, the presence of demagogues
such as Huey Long and Father Coghlan (his right-wing radio talks attracted 30
million listeners), the fascist militias, the Ku Klux Klan with 4 million
members.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Hollywood avoided all criticism of his
policies, even though the studios were famously run by Jewish immigrants. They
were concerned that the plight of Jews in Germany would be made even worse. And
of course they were concerned that their central European markets might be
imperilled. When Britain and France declared war in September 1939, more than
90% of Americans voted to stay out. (Until December 1941, Ford had factories in
Germany turning out trucks for the Wehrmacht, without which they could not have
invaded France, let alone Russia.)
The Nazis were film enthusiasts. Dr Goebbels may have burned Jewish books but
he regarded Gone With the Wind - produced by the not exactly Aryan David O
Selznick - as the finest expression of cinematic art, and showed it as a
supreme example to his propaganda ministry. Chaplin, however, was another
matter.
Years ago, Ivor Montagu, a close friend of Chaplin's, told me that he had been
in Berlin in 1934 and had come across a book called The Jews Are Looking at
You, a parody of a children's series, The Animals Are Looking at You. In it,
Chaplin was described as a disgusting Jewish acrobat. The Nazis had been deeply
offended by the rapturous reception given to Chaplin on his visit to Germany in
1931. Montagu sent this book to Chaplin, and felt that it may well have been
the spark that led to the production of The Great Dictator.
Chaplin once said, "None of my films are political", but in a sense all of them
were. In a strait-laced society, he represented a rebel. This was another
reason the Nazis loathed him - this comic image of a man resembling their
Führer cocking a snook at authority.
When Chaplin began work on the script of The Great Dictator in 1938, there had
still been no anti-Nazi films from mainstream Hollywood. Blockade came out that
year, but as one critic said: "The film has a curious unreality considering the
grim reality behind it." It was set in the Spanish civil war, but no mention
was made of fascist or Republican forces or even the civil war, in case a
regime of left or right objected. As it was, when The Great Dictator was first
announced - as The Dictator - the British, anxious not to upset Herr Hitler,
said they would ban it. The Jewish producers of Hollywood tried to persuade
Chaplin not to proceed, and it took an intervention from Franklin Roosevelt to
persuade him to continue.
Chaplin decided to play two parts - the dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, and a Jewish
barber who looks exactly like him. He cast Jack Oakie as Benzino Napaloni,
Hynkel's Italian counterpart. Chaplin, alas, worked incredibly slowly and it
was not until September 1939, a few days after the outbreak of the second world
war, that he began shooting - under conditions of great secrecy. By the time
Chaplin had reached the editing stage, Hitler had launched the blitzkrieg.
France fell in a month; Denmark in a matter of hours. Chaplin was so appalled
he considered shelving the film. "Hitler is a horrible menace to civilisation,"
he said, "rather than someone to laugh at."
Instead, he kept working on the ending. Originally, the film was to have
concluded with a great pacifist montage along the lines of DW Griffith's
Intolerance (1916), but the more he shot, the less it seemed to work. He
decided to end it with a simple but heartfelt speech, given not by the
dictator, not by the barber, but by himself, Charlie Chaplin. The speech
aroused bitter controversy - it still does - but the film was a tremendous
success. It made twice as much money as any other Chaplin feature. Yet it was
banned throughout occupied Europe, in parts of South America and even in the
Irish Free State.
The Great Dictator was the beginning of the end for Chaplin in the US.
Objections were raised to his politics, to his private life and to his
political statement about war, Monsieur Verdoux. The most beloved man in the
world became the most hated in America. In 1952, while he was sailing with his
family for England, the government revoked his re-entry permit and the man who
had helped to found Hollywood was locked out of the US.
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