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Complicated Dictator: The Untold Story of the Concentration Camp Scenes from Chaplin's 1940 Hollywood Anti-Fascist Comedy That Audiences Never Saw

In his 1964 autobiography, Charles Chaplin wrote that had he known of the "actual horrors" of concentration camps, he could not have made The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940).  Perhaps what Chaplin meant to say was that had he known of actual horrors, he could not have made the film in the same way he made it in 1940.  Like Adorno's oft-quoted dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, the passage from Chaplin's autobiography has taken on a life of its own.  It evocatively suggests the film's unique status both as Hollywood studio film, and as comedy that went further than other Hollywood films in sharply undercutting Nazism and fascism.  Yet it also reminds the reader that the film ultimately fell far short in addressing the magnitude of Nazi atrocities.  The passage from Chaplin's autobiography highlights The Great Dictator as Hollywood's forthright anti-Nazi exception, ultimately proving the rule.  Like poetry in Adorno's dictum, film remains inadequate to the task of representing the magnitude of Nazi atrocities. 

In both popular as well as scholarly literature, The Great Dictator along with a handful of other Hollywood films of the period have come to epitomize the American film industry's desultory response to Nazi anti-Semitism.  Conventional wisdom holds that Hollywood, acting solely in its global economic and domestic political interests, shied away from even more pointed attacks on Germany.  While partly true, this argument fails to acknowledge a bigger picture.  Films of this period do indeed lack the graphic intensity of say, a Schindler's List.  Yet the Hollywood profit motive-cowardice thesis misses a key point: what if audiences neither needed nor wanted to see excessively obvious depictions of Nazi anti-Semitism?  What if these cinematic representations instead existed within a complex and diverse cultural eco-sphere of books, newspaper accounts, radio broadcasts, newsreels, other short subjects, and publicity surrounding the films?  What if audiences relied upon this highly sophisticated network of textual bric-a-brac to make sense of how the films themselves alluded to the more serious topicality and relevance of Nazi anti-Semitism?  In this sense, films such as Great Dictator did not mock Nazism in isolation, but worked with audiences through multi-layered meanings that functioned intertextually, negotiating how popular culture represented Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism.

Rather than highlight Nazi atrocities, for example, the trailer for The Great Dictator emphasizes for audiences the familiar contours of genre and Chaplin's persona as a way to make sense of the film's anti-Nazi politics.  Playing a dual role in his first synchronized dialogue film, Chaplin exploits recognizable sight gags to deflate the pompous fascist aesthetics of Adenoid Hynkel.  But Chaplin also capitalizes on his Little Tramp persona, easily translating this figure into what some drafts of the script called "the little Jew."  The trailer does not so much ask audiences to see the film as an anti-Nazi film, as much as it asks audiences to see the film's anti-Nazism as operating in relation to Chaplin's other successful films.

Much of the subsequent attention to The Great Dictator continues to show reverence for Chaplin's estimation that he could not have made the film had he known of the actual horrors.  However, this fixation with auteurist qualms overlooks how a constellation of texts beyond The Great Dictator - including the film's own coming attractions - may have helped audiences negotiate the meaning of what a concentration camp might look like, or what an anti-Nazi film ought to do.  Perhaps in reaction to the familiar high culture-low culture debates concerning the propriety of humor and the Holocaust, some scholarship has emphasized the importance of The Great Dictator as quintessential anti-fascist comedy.  As Louis Kaplan notes in "'It Will Get a Terrific Laugh': On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor," the world fortunately has "exceptional comic film documents like The Great Dictator or Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be," since "only these films had the audacity to attest to the power of life-affirming laughter in the face of a homicidal death machine and to overstep the lines of good taste" (343).  As Kaplan argues, it is the subversive and anarchic humor of these films, rather than the stultifying and ponderous memorializations, that recalls the power of transgression and bad taste to provoke, challenge, protest, and interrupt attempts to exert uniformity and control.  Whether in a totalitarian state or in an authenticated set of postwar proscribed meanings, the transgressive humor of these films, as Kaplan sees them, liberates audiences from authorized and proscribed lessons learned from the Holocaust.

While Kaplan usefully reminds us that what he calls "the liberating laughter of Holocaust humor" (344) also deserves consideration as a legitimate form of commemoration alongside more serious texts, placing too much emphasis on transgression as a form of remembrance risks overlooking the films' dynamic nature of representation.  Audiences had to learn how to laugh at a concentration camp.  The anti-fascist satire of The Great Dictator did not appear fully formed, but emerged over time and in relation to the delimits of seriousness.  Humor in this sense not only transgresses tastefulness, but slips between and among the bounds of both taste and seriousness.  However The Great Dictator manages to transgress those boundaries today, it produced for audiences in 1940 closely tailored responses, attenuated to a particular historical moment.  As revealed in this publicity still, appearing widely in American newspapers to promote the film, such horsing around with the barbed wire of the concentration camp could co-exist with the film's much more serious and celebrated anti-fascist message.  The final version of the film emphasized slapstick comedy as anti-fascist tool that could undercut totalitarian self-importance and pomposity.  But archival research of production materials from the film shows that the concentration camp setting initially played a much more central role to the narrative, and that slapstick gags in the camp were central to the film's anti-fascist politics.  The still reveals something of a shifting and dynamic set of depictions: at first a pretext for multiple sight gags, the camp accrued more pointed comedic and anti-fascist meanings in subsequent drafts of the script, before much of the slapstick shifted to the scenes with the dictators and the camp setting assumed its more muted presence in the release print.

In the final version of the film, only three short scenes of the camp remain.

The diminished presence of the camp in the film seems striking, given its centrality in early drafts of the script.  These drafts featured extensive use of sight gags, physical comedy, and potty humor.  A rough note from perhaps 1938 or 1939 proposed having the Jewish barber leave his hand up after a sieg heil salute with a request to use the bathroom.  Such comedy remained consistent with the Little Tramp persona, intentionally or unintentionally undermining brutish authority, but with escalating consequences: in this case, the barber ends up in solitary confinement.  Perhaps a bleaker reference to the brutal conditions of the camps, the extant bit of requesting a smoking room comes across as both more tasteful and bitter by comparison.  In shifting its ridicule of the fascist state to the staterooms, though, The Great Dictator abandoned the subversive potential Chaplin had initially explored in scripts situating comedy inside the camp.  As a result, the transgressive nature of how the film depicted the camps morphed into something more diffuse and thus became more dependent upon images like the publicity still of Chaplin and star Reginald Denny biting down on barbed wire.

A different draft from late October 1938 indicates the film's more pointed references to the existence of camps, noting that all of "the very best people" get sent to concentration camps.  Consistent with Chaplin's Little Tramp persona, in the words of the script "the Little Jew hangs on to his optimism."  With the procession of wildlife that occurs when he pats his bed, the lightheartedness of such gags seems striking given more modern depictions of the camps.  However, rather than dismiss such depictions as only indicative of how little Chaplin knew of the "actual horrors," one might consider as well such lightheartedness as a function of the film's anti-Nazi politics.  In particular, such scenes suggest that resourcefulness and optimism could also serve as forms of resistance against a dictatorship which actively sought to humiliate and demoralize its targets.

The same script later shows acts of what it calls "both conscious and unconscious sabotage."  The act of humiliating the humiliators through comic routines was a familiar refrain in these early drafts.  As this example shows, acts of resistance included such gags such as slapping storm troopers in the face with a dirty mop, or breaking a basket of eggs when giving the Fascist salute.

These omitted sequences suggest an evolving strategy in which slapstick comedy negotiated the seriousness of Nazi persecution, as opposed to the film's serious melodrama and pathos negotiating its anti-Nazi silliness.  As Chaplin developed his script, the silliness of scenes in the concentration camp became the silliness of scenes in the fascist houses of state.  The film's strategy of pitting silliness, embodied by its anti-fascist satire, against a more serious melodrama and pathos showing life under fascism, ultimately could negotiate both its taste and wartime politics amid an extremely divisive debate over whether the United States should enter World War II.  In September 1939, for example, the industry trade group the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association issued a memo asserting Hollywood's responsibility "to keep genuine screen entertainment flowing - undeflected by war time propaganda, unpolluted by poisonous animosities."  The memo specifically singled out what it called "'hate' pictures" and their unwelcome place on what Will Hays called "America's amusement screen."  Particularly nettlesome for the industry at that time were films that disparaged or belittled members of other nations.  The Great Dictator offers some indication, not just of how little one knew of "actual horrors," but also of the utility of comedy to negotiate industry self-regulation and depict the horrors one did know in 1940.

As originally drafted in the script for The Great Dictator, the concentration camp scenes shed new light on the film's anti-fascist satire, suggesting that the film's comedic and political strategies functioned far more flexibly and less stable than the release print would suggest.  While Chaplin remained a powerful figure in Hollywood, he also had to navigate industry demands to produce entertainment and avoid producing too political a film that risked incurring the charge of propaganda.  The migration of slapstick in the concentration camp to highly specific slapstick references upending fascist dictatorships represents one aspect of a shifting strategy that used comedy as a way to address serious issues.  Rather than view the film's serio-comic polarity as a strategy that emerged fully formed, further research might consider how this polarity developed over time from a set of evolving narrative and visual strategies, beginning with the film's pre-production materials and then flexibly responding to a shifting context of both industrial practices and world events.

Bibliography: 

Chaplin, Charles.  My Autobiography.  New York NY: Simon, Schuster, 1964.

Delage, Christian.  Chaplin Facing History.  Charles Penwarden, trans.  Histoire Figurée.  Paris France: Jean Michel Place, 2005.

Kaplan, Louis.  "'It Will Get a Terrific Laugh': On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor."  Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture.  Henry Jenkins et al., eds.  Durham NC: Duke U P, 2002. 343-56.

Maland, Charles J.  Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image.  Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1989.

Robinson, David.  Chaplin: His Life and Art.  New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 1985.