Use gags to reveal the brutal, ridiculous, crude and ugly nature of the dictator.
At the beginning of 1933, after hitler, the fascist leader, became chancellor of Germany, he persecuted progressives and Jews at home and stepped up the expansion of armaments and wars abroad. At that time, Chaplin received a set of postcards from the American journalist Vanderbilt when he visited Germany.
The whole print is Hitler's speech, and each photo is taken in a different pose. One was of Hitler shouting out to the people, palms bent like two paws. The other hand clenched at the chest as if grasping a dumbbell.
There was also a picture of him saluting, with his right hand waved diagonally upwards. Chaplin saw that and thought of putting a stack of dirty plates on his hand. What surprised him even more was that Hitler looked strange: a small toothbrush-like beard under his nose and a few strands of hair on his head.
When his good friends Einstein and His wife and Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, were forced to leave Germany and go into exile in the United States, he felt that Hitler's face was not funny, but sinister and terrifying. Chaplin thought hitler, who was born in the same year as him, was a madman!
One day in 1937, when Chaplin was at a party with the British film director and producer Koda, he talked to Koda about Hitler's appearance, which was very similar to his appearance as a tramp. Koda suggested that a story about Hitler could be made up based on plots that caused misunderstandings based on similar appearances.
In the second half of 1937, he secretly wrote the script that would later be called The Great Dictator, and he conceived and designed the two protagonists of the similar-looking Tomanian state dictator, the Leader of the Double Cross Party, and the Jewish Barber, all played by him.
Although the dictator Xinger and the Jewish barber are exactly the same, it is purely coincidental. Here is the story of a period of madness dominated between the two world wars. At this time, freedom was trampled on and humanity was ravaged.
Chaplin scrutinized the script with great patience, writing the dialogue in the film, which averaged about 300 words a day. At the time of the creation of The Great Dictator, the German fascists annexed Austria in the spring of 1938 and invaded Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, and Chaplin's odiru in the play was a metaphor for these countries.
Meanwhile, another "war" was taking place far beyond the European battlefield, with the two sides engaged in near-short engagements. Because some newspapers published the first draft of the script of The Great Dictator, the German Empire was furious with such blatant anti-Nazi content.
Amid this uproar, United Pictures received a notice from the office of Harrison Hayes, chairman of the American Film Production and Distribution Board, saying that Chaplin would be in trouble and warning Chaplin to stop filming.
Chaplin said: "I have to laugh at Hitler... I never imagined that such an atrocity could happen outside of the place where the Wild Australians lived! He was determined to make the film, even if Lianmei did not care, he rented a theater to screen it.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler attacked Poland without declaring war, the Second World War broke out in full swing, Hitler suddenly blitzed Western Europe, broke through the Maginot Line, France fell, Chaplin's friend Churchill was appointed prime minister in danger, leading the people and soldiers of the LinkedIn countries to rise up and fight Hitler.
Chaplin actively prepared for the screening of "The Great Dictator", despite all the intimidation of the Nazis, claiming to create chaos when the film was released, throwing stink bombs in theaters, shooting at the screen... After the film's official release in 1940, the sensational effect lasted for several years.
New Yorkers scrambled to see it, and the two theaters screened together for more than 3 months. The film then arrived in England, where, albeit during the war, the film was seen with unprecedented pomp and circumstance. It broke the record for consecutive releases and blockbusters of Drow's films.
During and after the End of the Second World War, it was successively released in allied forces and in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, and received unprecedented welcome and praise, giving people all over the world confidence and strength to defeat fascism. Later, it sold the most copies of all Chaplin films.
Chaplin uses the harmonic method to virtualize personal names and country names, uses the coincidence method to set up two very different but similar-looking characters, uses the misunderstanding method to form a dramatic plot, and uses seemingly farcical gags to reveal the barbaric, ridiculous, crude and ugly nature of the dictator.
Source: Charles. Spencer. Chaplin's Autobiography of Chaplin has been abridged in chapter 18