The Great Dictator

[onethatcares]

just started on TCM.

It's worth a watch.

[calikid]

1. I just finished watching it for the first time, Wow.

It seems as though this was taken from todays headlines. The final speech was a thing of beauty.

[abqtommy]

2. One of the best movies ever!

[colsohlibgal]

3. Great Movie!

Chaplin sure had spunk, had Germany prevailed Hitler would have a hit out on him. Just a brutal parody.

[nuxvomica]

4. I watched the whole movie for the first time

It was stranger and funnier than I had imagined. Love the "Double Cross" flags. Hadn't known Meredith Wilson (The Music Man) did the score. What struck me most was the character of dictator Adenoid Hynkel was much more of a buffoon than Hitler. Imperious and narcissistic like Hitler but much more of a screw-up, the protrayal is actually closer to Donald Trump! The TCM host noted that the movie was made before the horrors of the Holocaust were widely known and Chaplin later regretted making the film -- would not have made such a comedy, which includes concentration camps, if he had known what was really going on in the Third Reich. So I was chilled to think of what we will learn about Trump's reich after he is defeated, especially with the immigrant detentions. What we know now is already horrifying.

[Aristus]

5. Actually, Hitler was much more of a buffoon than most people know.

He has gone down in history as a brutal, monstrous dictator who coldly ordered the murder of twelve million people, and started the bloodiest war in history.

But the people who knew him well said that his formidable public image was a carefully-crafted falsehood. They say that in private, he was sloppy, lazy, petulant, unreasonable, obnoxious, and enjoying only the lowest forms of humor, practical jokes. And only if someone else was the butt of the joke. He was completely unable to laugh at himself, or use self-deprecating humor. He was an abysmally incompetent administrator, and left the nuts and bolts of governing a nation to others, to leave himself free to dream his grandiose dreams of world conquest.

That definitely sounds like someone we know...

[nuxvomica]

6. Fascinating!

I sort of new that but it's not part of my ongoing impression of Hitler. Thanks for posting that.

[mnmoderatedem]

7. why bother?

we watch it for real every day, ever since trump took office