Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Speaking Against Fascism

Over the past year, I have tried, at various times, to watch Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) because I kept seeing Chaplin’s famous speech from the end of the film. Every time I started the film, I couldn’t get past the first half hour, where Chaplin’s Jewish barber survives World War I and rescues Commander Schultz. I didn’t finish the movie until I reread Annette Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe a few weeks back for my “Lost Voices in American Literature” course. At the end of the novel, Lee, who is Cowney’s supervisor at the Grove Park Inn, takes Cowney to town to see a reshowing of The Great Dictator. Before discussing the novel in class, I wanted to watch the entire film, and, over a couple of days, I did.

I could spend an entire post on The Great Dictator; however, I don’t want to do that right now. Instead, I want to look at the film in relation to Even As We Breathe, specifically Chaplin’s famous speech at the end of the film since that is the scene that Cowney discusses as he sits in the movie theater. Cowney mentions that Chaplin’s concluding speech, where he looks like a mirror image of Adolf Hitler and “pleads with the world to unite in the name of democracy,” stood out to him because he had “never heard a finer speech in his lifetime.”