Director: Charlie Chaplin
Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Henry Daniell
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, several times. So much so that I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long* to write a review of this one.
The real question is: Have you, dear reader, seen it?
Odds are you probably haven’t seen the whole film, but you might very well have seen the infamous final scene where the barber (Chaplin), having completed his Prince and the Pauper routine on Adenoid Hynkel (also Chaplin, naturally) and gives a speech to a waiting world where he begs for the decency of humanity**.
Did I Like It: You really should watch the rest of the film, as it is one of Chaplin’s most fully realized comedies. A farewell to his Tramp persona***, he is doing things here that it took most of Hollywood still years to realize in the context of a sound film. It’s a deeply, deeply funny film. I challenge you to get to Hynkel’s first speech and not marvel that Chaplin was going to be just as funny when talking as he had been during his preceding decades of prancing.
What’s more, it’s funny about a thing that is often too horrible to really comprehend. And as such, it works just as well in 2025 as it did 85 years ago.
But it wouldn’t be a Chaplin film without it hitting you in the chest a little bit, and so we come back to that last speech. Imagining a world where Hitler—or any fascist leader of a city state; I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks—suddenly wakes up and wants to bring some measure of peace to the world is a pretty brazen fantasy. Did Hynkel’s followers take the words to heart? Did the world become more peaceful? Is it even possible for the world at large to respond to such a plea?
Maybe not. We don’t see that reaction, other than Hannah (Goddard, proving she was the luminescent star of the age) telling us to listen.
Maybe, just maybe, after a century, we’ll start doing just that.
So, sure. The final speech is as good a place as any to start with the film. But you should really watch the whole thing.
*So close to the fabled review number 1000 that I can nearly smell it.
**For some reason every clip plays with the score from Inception (2010), for reasons I’ll never understand.
***Chaplin insisted Modern Times (1936) is truly the last Tramp film, and that he would never make a sound film with the little fellow, but when our Barber dons a bowler and has a cane and trips through some pantomime, it is hard not to view this film as the ultimate fate of the Tramp.