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Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator

Filmmaker, teacher and novelist, Simon Louvish is also the acclaimed author of a sequence of biographies of the great clowns of screen comedy, including Man on the Flying Trapeze (1997) about W. C. Fields, Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers (1999), and Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy (2001), all published by Faber. More recent works have included Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett(2003), Mae West: It Ain't No Sin (2005), and Cecil B. DeMille and The Golden Calf (2007). In 2009 Faber (in the UK) and St Martin’s Press (in the US) will publish Louvish’s latest and keenly awaited study, Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey. In this Sneak Preview extract for FilmInFocus, Louvish explores the dark and tumultuous circumstances in which Chaplin set about the making of one of his greatest works, The Great Dictator (1940).

Chaplin’s final script for The Great Dictator was a massive 300-page affair. For the first time it set down in writing precise details of action and gesture, rather than these being worked out during the shoot. Production lasted a total of 559 days, with an early Schedule of Shooting giving a glimpse of the general atmosphere on the set:

Since it has not been found possible to arrange these weekly schedules with any brilliant accuracy, perhaps it would be better simply to list the probable order in which the next scenes and sequences will be shot. It must be remembered, however, that even though the schedule is thus qualified it is still subject to change on short notice. That’s the way life is, citizens!

Information Department: Christmas will fall, as usual, on or about the twenty-fifth of the month. Guests will please keep their dogs at least thirty feet from the Christmas trees.

As shooting proceeded through the New Year into 1940, another notice, posted on Tuesday 2 January, proclaimed: “Please throw all broken New Year’s resolutions in receptacles located at strategic spots . . .” Chaplin’s resolution, however, remained unbroken. In the time that had elapsed between the 1938 draft and completion, the war in Europe had broken out, Poland was invaded and her cities bombed, the Germans had marched into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, and Paris was occupied on 13 June 1940. The blitz on British cities began with a massive thousand-plane raid on 15 August. In September Germany, Italy and Japan formed their Axis pact, and Chaplin’s alliance between Hynkel and Jack Oakie’s Benzino Napaloni was sealed in real blood.

Americans, however, were not yet certain as to their role in this second World War. President Roosevelt himself had signed a “Neutrality Act” in 1937 which barred loans to warring powers and restricted trade with belligerent countries. This was amended in November 1939 in response to the threat to US allies, France and Britain, and allowed arms to be sold ‘cash and carry’. A vast $2.5 billion appropriation was presented to Congress in May 1940, to expand the US Army and Navy. In September Congress passed the Selective Service Act to register all men aged between twenty-one and thirty-six. It was clear that Roosevelt favored intervention, but many influential Americans were still in favor of staying out of the European battlefield. Pearl Harbor was over a year in the future.

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Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel with Jack
Oakie's Benzini Napaloni

Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was therefore an unintended battle-cry, as Hollywood pussyfooted around the subject of anti-fascist commitment. The Hays Code itself prohibited movies from insulting or offending other countries, as the Marx Brothers discovered when the line “You can’t Mussolini all of us” was banned from A Night at the Opera in 1935. This was policed as sternly in the case of Nazi Germany as any other regime the United States was not in conflict with. Despite the Jewishness of most of Hollywood’s studio leaders, the overwhelming feeling as late as 1936, as recorded by Neil Gabler in his book on Hollywood’s Jewish moguls, An Empire of Their Own, was that “Jews should not stick their necks out.” Very few openly antifascist films were produced. (Anatole Litvak’s 1939 Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm of 1940 were among the few examples.) Even after the war began in Europe, Gabler recounts, the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, spoke to Jewish executives in Hollywood, telling them, as related by Douglas Fairbanks, that “although he did not think that Britain would lose the war, still, she had not won it yet. He repeated very forcefully that there was no reason for our ever becoming involved in any way.”

Kennedy told the executives that “the Jews were on the spot, and they should stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the ‘democracies’ versus the “dictators.” He said that anti-Semitism was growing in Britain and that the Jews were being blamed for the war. Ben Hecht later wrote that, because of this kind of pressure from powerful people, “all of Hollywood’s top Jews went around with their grief hidden like a Jewish fox under their gentile vests.”

Chaplin’s independence however, and precisely his non-Jewishness, made all the difference in his ability to cut through this knot. There were, nevertheless, momentary wobbles, as Chaplin wondered if his comic-book Nazism was being overtaken by events that were unsatirizable. These doubts were laid to rest, his assistant Dan James later related, by a direct message from President Roosevelt, relayed by his close advisor, Harry Hopkins, that he should ignore the dissuaders and press ahead. Roosevelt was well aware that an anti-Nazi message from America’s most popular film-maker, Tramp or not, would bolster the case that he was eventually to make in December 1940, when he pledged US military aid to Great Britain in his “arsenal of democracy’ speech.