"The Great Dictator" is a Great Film.

I don't use that word lightly. In this blog, I've reviewed movies that were good, bad, terrible, and freakin' cool. But The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin's satire of the contemporaneous Nazi Germany, is a great film, just in the same sense that George Washington was a great man. Alternately hilarious, poignant, and terrifying, the movie is not flawless by any means, but its greatness partially stems from the fact that even many of its flaws work out in the film's favor.

The Great Dictator tells the story of an unnamed German war hero, identified only by his civilian identity, as "a Jewish Barber." After delivering some typically Chaplinesque slapstick on the front lines in the opening scene, the Barber displays heroism during the final battle of World War I, only to be injured in a plane crash. He falls into a coma, and wakes up during the height of Jewish persecution under Nazi Germany. It's a crueler, darker twist on the old Rip van Winkle tale, one in which the Barber has to learn the hard way that life has become very unkind to Jews in Germany.

As the Barber, Charlie Chaplin (who also directed, produced, wrote, and helped score the film) plays the role as a very slight variation of his trademark "Little Tramp" character. The Great Dictator apparently sparked a (still on-going) debate about whether the Jewish Barber and the Little Tramp should be considered the same character, but aside from the fact that the Tramp was a silent-film character and the Barber speaks, the two characters are clearly one and the same. It's not enough to say that the Barber is a "thinly-disguised" version of the Tramp; there really is no disguise at all.

Similarly, the fictional names Chaplin gives to the film's real-life characters are clearly not intended to disguise who they really are. In addition to the Barber, Chaplin plays Tomanian Phooey Adenoid Hynkel (German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler), who has a rivalrous alliance with Bacterian dictator Benzino Napaloni (Italian dictator Bentio Mussolini). The parallels are so clearly meant to be drawn that one almost wonders why Chaplin bothered to come up with false names.

This was a subject so important to Chaplin that it marks the end of his long-standing one-man boycott against the end of the silent era; the characters speak with great purpose of character, from the Barber's humble eloquence, to Hynkel's pitch-perfect parody of Hitler's oratory style, to Jack Oakie's fearlessly broad, scene-stealing performance as Napaloni, which caricatures Italians beyond offensiveness, and takes the caricature straight into the realm of innocent playfulness.

I said that this film is not flawless, and I meant it. Some of the dialogue is preachy, some of the plot developments, too-obviously contrived. But we forgive these flaws, because we sense a heart at their center. One of the most interesting flaws is that some of the comedy just doesn't work, to the point that I suspect that Chaplin was kind of hoping that it wouldn't always generate laughs. For example, one scene makes a far too hasty transition from dramatic suspense to comic slapstick, as two storm troopers harass the hapless, innocent Barber, and the brief fight sequence is abruptly ended, when a a woman conks all three of them over the head with a frying pan. This causes the Barber to dance deliriously about the street in a "comical" daze. It's a very Chaplinesque dance, but this time, it's not funny, because every window in the background is emblazoned with the word "JEW," just as windows were in real German-Jewish ghettos. I submit that Chaplin's clowning isn't supposed to make us laugh here; we're supposed to be distracted by the storm troopers' hateful graffiti in the background. Those postings identifying merchants and residents as Jews serve as an ever-present reminder that the Barber and his fellow Jews live in a constant state of peril, and at the mercy of Hynkel and his brutish storm trooper thugs.

How quickly we forget, but when Schindler's List, which also dealt so disturbingly with the Nazi regime, came out in 1993, it wasn't just a movie. It was, without exaggeration, a cultural phenomenon. Lines were around the block, high schools sponsored class trips to screenings, and theaters forfeited profit by refusing to sell snacks to audiences, out of respect for the film. The Great Dictator is every bit as important a film as Schindler's List. But at least The Great Dictator is fun to watch.