Post by: adminssd on March 17, 2025, 10:56:58 AM
[html]Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, […]
Charlie Chaplin came up in vaudeville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mastery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skepticism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent picture “a universal means of expression,” whereas the talkies, as they were then known, “necessarily have a limited field.” Nevertheless, he was too astute a reader of public tastes to believe he could stay silent forever, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — literally, in the case of Modern Times. In that celebrated film, his iconic character the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unintelligible hash of cod French and Italian, and yet still somehow gets his meaning across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.
That scene appears in the CinemaStix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent co*edian opens his mouth,” which co*es not in Modern Times but The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascendant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chaplin plays two roles: the narrow-mustachioed Hitler parody Adenoid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonally and rhythmically convincing ersatz German, and a Tramp-like Jewish Barber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines co*e at the film’s very end.
Dressed as the dictator in order to escape the camp, the Barber suddenly finds himself giving a speech at a victory parade. When he speaks, he famously does so in Chaplin’s natural voice, expressing sentiments that sound like Chaplin’s own: inveighing against “machine men with machine minds,” making a plea for liberty, brotherhood, and goodwill toward men.
Though it may have been Chaplin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dictator isn’t his most critically acclaimed picture. When it was made, the United States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe hadn’t yet co*e to light. This film’s relationship with actual historical events thus feels uneasy, as if Chaplin himself wasn’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his climactic speech was only created as a replacement for an intended final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writing and revising over a period of months. It’s more than a little ironic that The Great Dictator is mainly remembered for a scene in which a co*ic genius to whom words were nothing as against image and movement forgoes all the techniques that made him a star — and indeed, forgoes co*edy itself.
Related content:
Charlie Chaplin Finds co*edy Even in the Brutality of WWI: A Scene from Shoulder Arms (1918)
Discover the Cinematic & co*edic Genius of Charlie Chaplin with 60+ Free Movies Online
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
[/html]Source: When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About (http://ht**://www.openculture.c**/2025/03/when-charlie-chaplin-first-spoke-onscreen.html)