The Making of The Great Dictator: How Charlie Chaplin Took On Hitler
Updated: Oct 15
On 15 October 1940 Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator opened in New York. America wasn't at war yet. Hollywood was still fretting about losing the German market. And the most famous comedian on the planet had just put around $1.5 million of his own money into a film that turned Adolf Hitler into a strutting, spluttering clown.
It very nearly didn't get made. German diplomats complained, British officials leaned on it, studios got cold feet and by the time the cameras rolled Britain was already at war. Here's how Chaplin pulled it off, what ended up on the cutting room floor and what happened once the world saw it.
Quick Answers
• When was The Great Dictator made? Chaplin wrote it in 1938 and 1939, shot most of it between September 1939 and early 1940 and was still reworking the ending into the summer of 1940.
• Who paid for it? Chaplin did, out of his own pocket.
• Was it Chaplin's first talkie? Yes. It was his first proper dialogue film. Modern Times (1936) had a synchronised score and sound effects but next to no speech.
• Did Hitler see it? Nobody knows for certain. A former German ministry worker later told Chaplin that Hitler watched it twice in private, but there's no hard proof.
• How did it do? It became the biggest earner of Chaplin's career and picked up five Oscar nominations.
• Was it banned? Yes, across Nazi-occupied Europe and in Spain, Italy and Ireland. West German cinemas didn't get it until 1958.
Two Men Born Four Days Apart
The coincidences were hard to ignore. Chaplin was born in London on 16 April 1889. Hitler was born in Austria four days later. Both grew up poor and both clawed their way up from nothing, Chaplin through the workhouses and music halls of south London and Hitler through the doss houses of pre-war Vienna. By the 1930s they even wore the same toothbrush moustache, and the resemblance was talked about so much that comedian Tommy Handley recorded a novelty song about it in 1939.
Chaplin's son Charles Jr later wrote in his memoir My Father, Charlie Chaplin that his dad couldn't think about Hitler without a shudder. He'd joke uneasily about it, and one line stuck: "he's the madman, I'm the comic". The unspoken bit was that it could easily have gone the other way.
The Nazis already hated him. Goebbels banned The Gold Rush in 1935, and a year earlier a Nazi picture book called The Jews Are Looking at You had branded Chaplin a "disgusting Jewish acrobat". He wasn't Jewish. He just refused to deny it, because he felt that rushing to correct the record would hand the antisemites a win. As he put it later, "One doesn't have to be a Jew to be anti-Nazi."
Whose Idea Was It Anyway?
Ask three people and you'll get three answers. Chaplin's friend Ivor Montagu said he'd posted him a copy of that Nazi book and reckoned it was what set the whole thing in motion. The American Film Institute's catalogue notes a modern claim that producer Alexander Korda suggested a Hitler story built around mistaken identity back in 1937.
Then there was Konrad Bercovici, a Romanian-born writer who swore the idea was his. He sued for more than $6 million, claiming he'd pitched the Little Tramp as Hitler in the mid-1930s. The case went to trial in New York in April 1947. Chaplin testified he'd never seen Bercovici's script and that he'd already outlined the story to friends, including the actor Melvyn Douglas. Then, before the jury could reach a verdict, Chaplin settled for $95,000. He never admitted anything, but plenty of people read the cheque as an admission all the same.
What isn't in dispute is how hard Chaplin studied his target. Jürgen Trimborn's biography of Leni Riefenstahl says he watched Triumph of the Will over and over to nail Hitler's gestures, and he pored over German newsreels for the ranting and the crowds. Luis Buñuel later recalled that when Chaplin and the French director René Clair saw Riefenstahl's film together, Clair was frightened by it while Chaplin couldn't stop laughing.
There's a nice irony buried in all this. Historian Richard Carr dug up evidence that Chaplin had once admired Mussolini, praising him in 1928 for putting Italy to work and reportedly repeating the old line about the trains running on time as late as March 1938. Within a couple of years Chaplin had turned him into Benzino Napaloni, a pompous buffoon who has a food fight with Hynkel. Not quite the treatment you'd expect for a man an Irish aristocrat had tried to shoot back in 1926.
Diplomats, Censors and Nervous Studios
In 1938 Chaplin lodged a script called The Dictator with the Library of Congress and told reporters he'd be playing a double role. The British press had a field day. The Germans didn't find it funny at all. In October 1938 Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles, complained to Joseph Breen at Hollywood's Production Code office about a film that would make fun of Hitler. Breen claimed he knew nothing about it, according to the AFI's production notes.
Britain was just as twitchy. In March 1939 the British Board of Film Censors asked for a story outline, and Chaplin told them he didn't have a script yet. Carr found files in the National Archives showing the Foreign Office first tried to get Chaplin to tone things down. When that didn't work, officials nudged the censors to look very hard at the finished film and hinted it might get banned elsewhere. Carr calls it "a classic British fudge".
Back home, the studios worried about the German market, the pro-Nazi German American Bund made noise and even Chaplin's own distributor, United Artists, got jittery. There was a mundane problem too. Paramount had already registered the title The Great Dictator, and Chaplin needed help from a Paramount vice-president, Y. Frank Freeman, to get it. Chaplin reportedly had his own wobbles too, and an encouraging message from President Roosevelt is said to have steadied him.
Then on 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany and overnight the British government stopped worrying about upsetting Hitler. The film it had tried to smother was suddenly useful propaganda.
Inside the Shoot
Set building started on 22 June 1939. Chaplin halted everything in early August to rework the script, then started shooting in September, just days after Britain went to war. The main shoot ran through to early February 1940. Security was tight, and when Life magazine got hold of a bootleg photo of Chaplin in his dictator get-up, he went to court and won an injunction.
The casting was sharp. Jack Oakie played Napaloni, the Mussolini stand-in. Henry Daniell was Garbitsch, a slippery take on Joseph Goebbels, and Billy Gilbert played Herring, a medal-clanking Hermann Göring, whose brother Albert was busy saving Jews at the time. Paulette Goddard played Hannah, the spirited girl in the ghetto. The AFI records that Fanny Brice was originally lined up to play the dictator's wife, and that Maurice Moscovitch, who played the kindly Mr Jaeckel, died not long after filming wrapped.
A few more things you won't find on most fact lists. Modern sources quoted by the AFI claim the barber's scenes and the dictator's scenes were shot at different frame rates, though that's never been properly confirmed. The assistant director, Dan James, took a whole series of behind-the-scenes photographs. Chaplin's older half-brother Sydney shot home movies on set in colour, footage that sat forgotten at the family villa in Switzerland until it surfaced in the 2002 documentary The Tramp and the Dictator, made by Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft and narrated by Kenneth Branagh. The publicity artist on the film was a young Al Hirschfeld, later the most famous caricaturist on Broadway.
Chaplin wrote the music himself with help from the composer Meredith Willson, who was 38 at the time and would go on to write The Music Man. The score is doing a lot of work in the film's best gags. Hynkel's dreamy dance with an inflatable globe is set to Wagner's Lohengrin, and the barber shaves a customer in perfect time to Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 5. Hynkel's speeches are delivered in a mock German that's pure noise apart from the odd Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, and there's a lovely bit where his secretary types out a thundering tirade in about four keystrokes.
Look closely at the shop signs in the ghetto and you'll spot something else. Some are written in Esperanto, the international language invented by the Jewish eye doctor Ludwig Zamenhof, which Hitler had denounced as part of a Jewish plot. It's the sort of detail that's easy to miss and impossible to forget once you've seen it.
Not everything survived the edit. Press materials and stills show two scenes that were cut, a Russian dance by the barber and a sequence where he tries to escape a concentration camp by chewing through the barbed wire.
Rewriting the Ending as France Fell
Chaplin showed friends an almost finished version in March 1940, but he wasn't done. When Paris fell in June, he changed the ending. The barber, who'd spent most of the film getting by on mime, steps up to the microphone in Hynkel's uniform and speaks straight into the camera for more than three minutes. Chaplin spent months drafting and redrafting that speech and, according to the official Chaplin site, he didn't finish shooting until July 1940.
It's still the most argued-over thing in the film. Critics in 1940 called it preachy, and Roger Ebert, who loved the comedy, said it "plays like a comedy followed by an editorial". Plenty of other people find it genuinely moving, and the speech has had a strange second life online, going viral as a protest anthem in 2017. Watch it for yourself below and see which camp you're in.
The opening credits had a sly wink of their own: "Any resemblance between Hynkel the Dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental." Chaplin had said back in the 1930s that the Little Tramp would never speak, and technically the barber isn't the Tramp. But it's hard to watch him shuffle about in that bowler and baggy suit and see anybody else. The Great Dictator was, in effect, the Tramp's last bow and the first time audiences heard Chaplin's real voice.
Premiere, Box Office and a Senate Summons
The film opened in New York and ran for fifteen weeks. The London premiere came in December 1940, right in the middle of the Blitz, with German bombers overhead. General release in the US followed in March 1941. It turned out to be the highest-grossing film of Chaplin's whole career and got five Oscar nominations, for best picture, best actor, best supporting actor for Oakie, best screenplay and best score. It didn't win any of them.
The New York Film Critics voted Chaplin best actor and he turned the award down, saying he didn't like actors being set against each other. Some reviewers grumbled that the film spent too long on the plight of German Jews, which tells you a lot about where America's head was in late 1940.
Politically it cost him. Once the film was out, Chaplin was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee looking into supposed war propaganda in Hollywood films. One member of the public wrote to Senator Robert Reynolds complaining that an "alien" was using America to air grudges against a foreign power. It was an early taste of the suspicion that followed Chaplin for the next decade, ending with him being shut out of the US in 1952 and settling in Switzerland for the rest of his life.
Did Hitler Ever Watch It?
This is the question everyone asks and the honest answer is that we don't know. The story goes that a German who'd worked in the Nazi culture ministry escaped and told Chaplin that Hitler had got hold of a print and watched it twice, alone. Chaplin said he'd have given anything to know what Hitler made of it. Nobody has ever produced documents to back the story up, so treat it as a tantalising maybe rather than a fact.
For what it's worth, Chaplin had his own view of the man. He said he'd studied Hitler so closely that he rated him as one of the greatest actors he'd ever seen.
Banned, Smuggled and Finally Seen
The film was banned in every country the Third Reich occupied, as well as in Spain, Italy and neutral Ireland. That didn't stop people trying. One wartime tale has Balkan resistance fighters slipping a print into a cinema in place of the advertised film. German officers in the audience reportedly enjoyed it at first, then worked out what they were watching, with some walking out and others shooting at the screen. It's a great story, though it's only ever been passed along as an anecdote.
When it was shown in liberated Rome in 1944, the audience laughed at Chaplin but sat in embarrassed silence through Oakie's Mussolini routine. Italy didn't get a proper public release until 1961, and even then the scenes with Napaloni's wife were cut to spare the feelings of Mussolini's widow. The uncut version wasn't shown there until 2002. Spain had to wait until after Franco died in 1975, and West German cinemas only got Der große Diktator in 1958.
Chaplin's Second Thoughts
Chaplin wasn't the only one taking shots at Hitler. The Three Stooges beat him to it with their short You Nazty Spy! in January 1940, and Ernst Lubitsch followed with To Be or Not to Be in 1942. But nobody else had Chaplin's reach, or put their own money on the line the way he did.
After the war, once the full horror of the camps was out in the open, Chaplin looked back on the film differently. In his autobiography he wrote that if he'd known what was really happening, he wouldn't have made it. It's a striking admission from a man who'd risked his fortune and his career to get the film made, and it explains why the laughs in The Great Dictator still come with a knot in the stomach. He was trying to puncture a monster while the monster was still on the rise, and only later did anyone realise how big it would get.
Eighty-odd years on, it's still one of the boldest things any Hollywood star did before Pearl Harbor. Chaplin, the silent clown who'd outlasted rivals like Buster Keaton and made a star of Jackie Coogan, finally opened his mouth on screen and used it to tell the world exactly what he thought of Adolf Hitler.
Further Reading
If you want the full story of how Chaplin's career, politics and private life fed into The Great Dictator, David Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art is the biography most Chaplin experts swear by. Robinson had full access to the Chaplin archive and covers the making of the film in detail.
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