Review for The Great Dictator

The Great Dictator is possibly one of the greatest satires to have ever been put to film and when you consider the time it was created you can understand why. A lot of Chaplin fans have a great debate over whether it is this film or earlier silent works (particularly The Kid and The Gold Rush) were his masterpiece. In my opinion, this film is almost as perfect a satire on a subject as Monty Python's Life of Brian was on religion.
Chaplin stars as dual roles as The Tramp, who is a barber in this guise and also as Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania. The second role is an obvious spoof on Hitler and his Third Reich and the little jokes throughout are just wonderful, such as the flag being a double cross, Goering and Goebbels now dubbed Herring and Garbage and a wonderful send up of Hitler by Chaplin. What make it even funnier is the little outbursts that Hynkel will have that are obviously gibberish, but actually sound like they could be a Hitler speech.
Though I loved this film, I have to say it is a very uneven one. The accents of the characters are all over the place with some with broad American accents and some with German and so on. It is this lack of consistency that damages the film in some way and Paulette Goddard seems to be on high-speed whenever she speaks. The Tramp is really a secondary character with little or no purpose and during these scenes where he is trying to woo the girl from next door it is really just a rehash of previous gags from his earlier films and all I wanted was to get back to what Hynkel was up to. This includes Herring showing him a bulletproof uniform which fails spectacularly and a meeting with Napaloni of Bacteria, an obvious spoof on Mussolini. Of course what everyone will remember is the wonderful speech at the end that Chaplin makes and really you feel that he is not doing this for effect, it is a true plea at the time for the madness to end. Later, Chaplin remarked that if he had known about the true horrors of the Holocaust he would never have made this film and it would be almost thirty years before anyone even attempted to tackle the subject for comedic purposes when Mel Brooks' created The Producers.
Bonus features include a twenty five minute colour behind the scenes footage. This is a fascinating look at what some of the scenes would have looked like in colour, however the lack of sound hurts it somewhat and a commentary explaining what was going on would have helped. Charlie the Barber is a classic Chaplin short and could almost have come from the barber scenes from the film itself. Chaplin Today is a nice documentary into the creation of the film and the background to how Chaplin was almost eerily accurate in his portrayal of the Nazi society. Finally, we have a ten minute show reel of all of Chaplin's movies which for newcomers is a lovely taster for just how good Chaplin was in all of his films.
The Great Dictator is an amazing film and one that even seventy years on is still as fresh and relevant as it was then. The comedy and the satire are spot on and it would be impossible to dismiss this as just another Chaplin comedy or propaganda film, it is something that transcends those and becomes as close to perfection as Chaplin ever reached and should be experienced by everyone.