CHAPLIN SENDING UP THE FUEHRER

The revival of Chaplin's "The Great Dictator' provides a timely reminder of the degenerate depths capitalism reaches under fascism.

More than that, the film contains two vital messages.

First, that key sections of society, to their cost, failed to take fascism sufficiently seriously last time, which Chaplin in vain tried to warn them about in this perceptive study made in 1939.

Secondly, that the only answer to fascism was for the people to mobilize themselves and to fight it, as the girl Hannah and the little barber finally decide to do.

Chaplin's main method of debunking fascism is to deride its sick, pretensions, its brute arrogance and treachery and its farcical incompetence, without ever ignoring its deadly dangerousness.

Some critics have said that by making us laugh at the demented behaviour of Adenoid Hynkel, the Fooey of Tomainia, Benzino Napoloni, the Duce of Bacteria, and the stormtroopers, Chaplin committed a gross error of taste and judgement.

Not so. One of the fascists' major weapons was blufi. Hitler and Mussolini bullied and bluffed their way to more diplomatic victories in the early years than they could ever have achieved by force of arms, thanks, of course, to the willing connivance of the bourgeois and social-democratic leaders of the time.

Chaplin exposes the bluster as consisting mainly of boasttul vanıty, and the fascists' apparent invincibility as being mostly pretence.

Far from being a 'great man' as Western apologists claimed, Chaplin's dictator is a paranoid coward who banishes maniac ravings and by petty bullying of subordinates.

The undistinguished origins of the upstart Fuehrer are further underlined by making the little Jewish barber his double with an undistinguished World War I background. What the real-life Corporal Shickelgruber might have ended up as, the barber has in fact become-a nobody.

Chaplin's send-up of Hitler's bombastic demagogy is a masterpiece. Hynkel's party operates under the sign of the double cross. The brains of the outfit is Garbitsch, the propaganda minister, who tries to control the Fooey's capricious fits and orchestrate the pogroms, the threats of war, and the shooting of strike leaders in order to keep popular dissent at a minimum.

The contrasting normalcy of ordinary human beings is provided by life in the Jewish quarter, to which the barber has just returned after 20 years in hospital with amnesia.

He quickly and painfully becomes acquainted with the new official policy of Jewbaiting, but his naive resistance reduces the bullying swagger of the stormtroopers to the buffoonery of Keystone Cops.

He befriends Hannah, a laundry girl, who also fights back, though more consciously. But the political backwardness of the ghetto is revealed when they begin to place hopes for some respite from persecution in a Hynkel policy switch connected with loans from Jewish bankers.

The collapse of this policy and the start of new pogroms calcues me varDer antohar tha hanhan of buying Hynkel himself and his Hitler was, after figure in Germany.

The renewed prompts ideas of a but the ingrained of the ghetto--and olitical leadership inem quickıy to nopeiessness.

The barber goes to the concentration camp and the girl and her family flee to Osterın ine act buttons for girl-friend. all, a cult offensive fight back, domesticity the lack of reduces lich. But Osterlich is invaded following a hysterical summit meeting between Hynkel and Napoloni where the two dictators squabble like spoilt children in trying to outsmart each other.

The great speech at the victory rally in conquered Osterlich is made by the Jewish barber who gets mistaken for Hynkel while escaping over the border in an officer's uniform and • is escorted to capital with full honours.

Garbitsch declaims that democracy, liberty, and quality are words to fool people. Only loyalty to state matters.

But the barber quietly calls on the people to unite and restore to themselves power taken trom them by the brutes who hate and fear progress; to fight to restore liberty and universal brotherhood of Jew, Gentile, Black, and White, free from the system of greed which enslaves all men.

His call to fight for a new decent world of reason is heard by the girl Hannah, who was the first to fight back against the stormtroopers, and whose new home has just been destroyed by the advancing Hynkel armies. As the film ends, she looks up in hope and determination.

The film is unforgettably funny. Chaplin, as Hynkel and the barber, and Jack Oakie, as the braggadocio Duce, are superb.

The appeals to democracy and unity as the way to save mankind obviously lack political depth; and, as usual with Chaplin, the film is extremely sentimental. But the artist's scrupulous sincerity outweighs these weaknesses and survives the farcical form the plot takes.

The main message of the fim, both as art and as a political work. rings true. Against all lies, hypocrisy, and servility. For truthfulness, simplicity, and humanity.

A great film.