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Great Dictator SCMS

Page history last edited by Steven A Carr 10 years, 9 months ago

FrontPage > Complicated Dictator


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

 

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.  The passage evocatively suggests the film's unique position as Hollywood film, using its comedy to go further than other Hollywood films in sharply undercutting Nazism and fascism, yet falling far short in addressing the seriousness of Nazi atrocities.  And like Adorno's dictum, the passage from Chaplin's autobiography highlights The Great Dictator as Hollywood's forthright anti-Nazi exception ultimately proving the rule that film and other arts remain inadequate to the task of representing the magnitude of Nazi atrocities. 

 

Rather than highlight Nazi atrocities, however, 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.

 

In both popular as well as scholarly literature, The Great Dictator along with a handful of other Hollywood films of the period has come to epitomize the American film industry's desultory response to Nazi anti-Semitism.  The conventional line of reasoning goes that Hollywood, as a result of global economic and domestic political interests, shied away from even more pointed attacks on Germany.  While the films of this period do indeed lack the graphic intensity of say, a Schindler's List, this widespread assessment misses a key point: what if audiences neither needed nor wanted to see graphic depictions of Nazi anti-Semitism, but instead relied upon a diverse textual eco-sphere of books, newspaper accounts, radio broadcasts, newsreels and other short subjects, and publicity surrounding films to make sense of how the films themselves alluded to the more serious topicality and relevance of Nazism?  In this sense, films such as Great Dictator did not mock Nazism alone, but worked with audiences because their multi-layered meanings functioned intertextually, mediated by other media representing Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism.

 

Perhaps in reaction to the familiar high culture-low culture debates returning to more recent discussions about 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).  It is the subversive and anarchic humor of these films, rather than the stultifying and ponderous memorializations, which 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 determining what lessons modern day audiences should learn from the Holocaust.

 

While Kaplan usefully reminds us that comedy can also commemorate what he calls "the liberating laughter of Holocaust humor" (344), much of this analysis treats the presence of this comedy as a static end result.  As a result, less attention explores how the anti-fascist satire comedy of The Great Dictator did not appear fully formed, but might have emerged as a process occurring over time and one that exists 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 to produce closely tailored responses attenuated to a particular historical moment.  As revealed by 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, even if that message eventually emerged from a slapstick located outside the concentration camp and located within the ridiculous antics of dictators.  The still also recalls the shifting role of the concentration camp in The Great Dictator.  Serving as a pretext for multiple slapstick gags, the camp played a central role in early drafts of the script before assuming its more muted presence in the final release print of the film.

 

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

 

One of the most striking aspects of The Great Dictator involves how little of the concentration camp remains in the film, given how centrally the concentration camp figured in early drafts of the film's script.  Early drafts of the script made much more extensive use of sight gags, physical, and potty humor in the camp.  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 gags remained consistent with the Little Tramp persona, intentionally or unintentionally undermining brutish authority, but with escalating consequences - in this case solitary confinement.  While perhaps a more pointed reference to the brutal conditions of the camps, the gag of requesting where the smoking rooms comes across as simultaneously more tasteful and bitter by comparison, as well as being more muted.  The final version of the film shifts its ridicule of the fascist state, setting that ridicule outside the confines of the camp and within that state's own pompous trappings.

 

Another draft of the script from late October 1938 makes reference to all of "the very best people" being 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.

 

The same script from October 1938 later shows acts of what it calls "both conscious and unconscious sabotage."  The act of humiliating the humiliators through comic routines remains a familiar motif in these early drafts.  As this example shows, these acts of resistance include slapstick 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 the silliness of its anti-fascist satire coupled with the seriousness of its melodrama and pathos 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, 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."

 

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 could incur 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.


 

Abstract: Charles Chaplin's anti-fascist comedy The Great Dictator (UA, 1940) is the Hollywood film that comes to mind regarding Hollywood's treatment before World War II of Nazism and the Holocaust, and the film that many believe they know. Recent archival research has revealed extensive unused scenes set in a concentration camp. In the film's release print, only three brief scenes set in a prison camp remain. This paper considers how the production context for the ongoing changes to these scenes presaged many of the thorny problems Hollywood later faced in depicting Nazi anti-Semitism.

 

Using archival materials housed at the Cineteca di Bologna Library, this paper charts an evolving strategy to satirize Nazi anti-Semitism through slapstick.  A 1938 treatment for the film entitled "Concentration Camp," for example extensively detailed "both conscious and unconscious sabotage" taking place in the camp through such familiar slapstick routines as a pie fight and an officer stepping into a boot filled with beer.  By the time of the film's release, however, all such scenes had disappeared.

 

Much discussion of the film has centered either on its courage in taking an anti-Nazi stance, or in the propriety of its taste and comedy following public awareness of the Holocaust.  This paper explores an alternate approach, using primary historical materials to address questions of reception.  While many have considered The Great Dictator as a completed text in discussing larger issues related to Holocaust representation, this paper returns to two thorny and relatively questions related to the filim: 1) can successive primary materials such as early drafts and script revisions help chart large-scale shifts in public sentiment toward Nazi anti-Semitism during this period? and 2) in what ways can these materials help illuminate reception contexts, such as determining how publicity for the actual film might have helped shape actual audience responses?

 

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.

 

Bio: Steven Alan Carr is Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, a 2002-03 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, a 2010-11 Loewenstein-Wiener Marcus Research Fellow at the American Jewish Archives, and Co-Director of the IPFW Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is the author of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (Cambridge U P, 2001).

 

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