Food Fighters

Maybe, just maybe, the food fight in THE GREAT DICTATOR was an influence on the deleted pie fight from DR STRANGELOVE? Is it even possible that the fruit-slinging that concludes the Marx Bros’ DUCK SOUP lies behind both? Maybe that’s a stretch. But reducing the horrors of war to the absurdity of food-flinging evidently has an honourable tradition. Maybe Laurel & Hardy suggested the theme by naming their great custard pie fight film THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY?

Chaplin is no slouch when it comes to foodstuffs as ammunition. A childhood of near-starvation left him with a complicated relationship with food — nearly every Chaplin film seems to have a gag about the absence of food, the smelliness of food, the noisiness of digestion, the perils of ingestion, or the use of various platters as ballistic weapons. BEHIND THE SCREEN featured one of comparatively few pitched pie fights in the silent screen’s history.

“To the buffet!” proclaims Billy Gilbert as Garbitsch, and audiences who like anticipating things may already be imagining some sploshy chaos. The swank dinners in Chaplin films always feature bizarre menus, selected not for compatibility but for slapstick possibilities. Here, the presence of the dictator of Bacteria, which stands for Italy, excuses the ever-present spaghetti. Surprisingly, mustard will prove more significant in the battle of the buffet.

Great reaction from Gilbert after he clears the buffet of undesirables, and then finds he’s to be included in their number. The actor has a unique ability to make his eyes stand out like horrified plums, loosely embedded in a slack pudding of a face — only the affronted orbs display emotion, but they compensate by sheer intensity for the limpness of the surrounding flesh.

Chaplin immediately recoils from an odorous Camemberg, a callback to countless cheese jokes in his past, most relevantly SHOULDER ARMS, where a similarly noisome cheese becomes a chemical weapon of devastating power.

Considering this kind of thing is new to him — dialogue played over the silent set-up for a gag where cream and mustard will be confused — he manages it very well. I can’t say that he’s as great a talking comic as he is a silent one, but he shows skill at combining the two forms — only Harold Lloyd and Laurel & Hardy really got to try the same thing.

The dispute as to whether the treaty will be signed before or after Napaloni’s troops are removed from the Osterlich border is classic vaudeville/music hall crosstalk. Anticipating the negotiation scenes in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and A DAY AT THE RACES. Fiona points out that Chaplin told Groucho he envied his facility with dialogue, adding weight to my hypothesis that Napaloni is a straight steal of Chico’s mangling of English. Here, however, Heinkel is the one playing it deliberately dense, attempting to wear the Bacterian dictator down by sheer refusal to recognize the basis of their argument.

Heinkel makes an angry gesture and spatters cream on the head of a flunky who’s tossing the spaghetti. Napaloni, in a rage, accidentally bites into the treaty, having incorporated it into his sandwich the way he intends to incorporate Osterlich into his empire.

The battle then becomes a matter of demonstrating with the buffet what the military forces of each dictator will do to the other’s. Napaloni stabs a huge sausage into a Devil’s Tower Wyoming heap of mashed potato, then swats it sideways. Heinkel bombards the punch bowl with an orange (I think it’s an orange. We’re in black and white so it’s more of a grey.)

The blocking of the scene is very simple but very, very effective. The two bosses and their two underlings are lines up along the table. Sometimes the leaders face off, sometimes they turn and complain to their seconds, a babel of Tomainian and Bacterian tirades. Dialogue as sheer noise. Overlapping a year before CITIZEN KANE, but to rather different effect.

Heinkel slathers mustard on his fresh plate of strawberries, and —

Then Napaloni bites into a too-mustardy sandwich. Well, he asked for the extra-hot English mustard, and it seems he can’t take it. Notably, perhaps, Chaplin denies Jack Oakie his own close-up, but the two men writhing on the divan as their throats combust is quite amusing.

Mustard was, of course, fully weaponized in the First World War, with far from hilarious consequences.

“Aiuta!” screams Il Duce. Either Chaplin couldn’t be bothered coming up with cod-Italian and resorted to the real thing, or Oakie is improvising.

This is all to get the characters into a furious political discussion in which neither can actually speak — they just mouth at each other in scorching muteness in between stuffing their gobs with hankies.

Recovering a bit, Heinkel attempts to demonstrate on a fistful of spaghetti how he will tear the Bacterians apart. Unfortunately for him, the many strands of pasta exhibit the same unbreakable qualities of the stacks of sticks or fasces used by the ancient Romans to signify group strength — E pluribus unum –– and which give the Fascist movement its name. Heinkel is left huffing as he stretches the spaghetti like a minute Charles Atlas demonstrating dynamic tension.

At an opportune moment he releases one end and twangs Napaloni in the kisser. So it’s war! Chaplin wields a sausage like a short sword, while Oakie grabs a pie. As Chekov says, you can’t introduce a custard pie in act two without going splurch in the kisser almost immediately, so a hack from the international press is introduced, peeping into the buffet room, his snooping features plastered in pie at once.

By the time Henry Daniell reenters, Heinkel and Napaloni are threatening one another with huge platters of mashed potato and something unidentifiable. Mutually assured destruction. Herring defuses the crisis and the stage is set for Tomainia’s invasion of Osterlich.

Very nice closing gag where Napaloni hands his mash to the Bacterian ambassador (Carter DeHaven? Really?), a much (even) smaller man, who totters under the unexpected weight of the potatoes, before crashing to the floor, offscreen. We don’t get to enjoy the sight of him buried in spud, but again Chaplin is enjoying the use of the audience’s imagination, which has the added advantage that he doesn’t have to cut away from HIMSELF.

TO BE CONCLUDED

ENOUGH IS SUFFICIENCY SCREAMS IL DUCE

Title above is a headline that appears towards the end of THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK, which I always found obscurely hilarious. I presume Mussolini must have been awkwardly translated from time to time in the early forties, often enough for the gag to be comprehensible, but it’s still funny even if not comprehended.

Salute envy — Napaloni’s salute is bigger than Heinkel’s. And the massive clock — not easy to devise a monument more outlandish than any real dictators have built to themselves, but Chaplin manages it — is two minutes slow.

This brief section of the film is full of visual effects — the kind of thing which, CC complained, took a long time to prepare and necessitated the precise planning of the script.

As the dictators drive off, poor Mrs Napaloni gets separated from her husband and mixed in with the crowd.

Planning scene: Garbitsch outlines how Napaloni can be made to feel inferior, by psychology. This kind of set-up is new to Chaplin, and it’s made possible by dialogue. One could, I guess, find ways to do it in a silent, but it would be even more laborious. The idea is to set out clearly what the intention is, so we can enjoy everything going wrong. A boring scene in itself, but one that builds anticipation and gets paid off in laughs.

I once had a brief conference with the acting head of my institution, Edinburgh College of Art, in his office. I was a mere student. He had an incredibly low chair for me to sit in, my arse practically scraping the floor, while he sat erect behind his desk. I remember feeling not so much intimidated as contemptuous.

I’ve forgotten who was it who told the story about Harry Cohn’s office being modeled on Mussolini’s. And Cohn described how Mussolini, after dismissing him, had the door open on cue, with an electric button on his desk. “That son-of-a-bitch!” Then Cohn dismissed his interviewee, and as he reached the door, it automatically clicked open.

So, things go wrong — Napaloni comes in via the wrong door, surprising Heinkel with a back-slap that knocks him from his chair, banging his chin on the desktop. Napaloni, of course, is oblivious or indifferent to this mishap.

A reprise of the very good salute/handshake gag from the station, the two men’s hands shooting up then out, always missing one another.

Jack Oakie’s Chico Marx imitation even goes so far as to borrow his unique truncation of words: “Ah, my brother dictate!”

The low chair works momentarily — Benzino is discomfited. He simply cannot perform from such a low position. Has trouble even crossing his legs. Chaplin tracks in to savour the triumph.

Sitting on the desk, he reverses the situation, and on “They like to see new faces, he not only does the weird Mussolini lower lip thing, emulated by Trump, he turns right to the camera, as Chaplin had advised Oakie to do if he wanted to upstage the maestro.

The barbershop gag is good, but curiously mistimed — it starts fading out too soon for my taste, “stepping on the gag” to use Jerry Lewis’s phrase. I think the situation is good enough that they could have extended the action of the two idiots cranking themselves ever higher. Curious also that nothing is made of the connection to Chaplin’s other character, a barber. But I don’t know what he could have made of it.

Review of the army: Napaloni eating nuts from a paper bag (DUCK SOUP?), discarding the shells with blithe malice all over his pall “Hinky.” This scene works by not showing any of the tanks or aircraft under review, just the reactions and a few sound effects. Chaplin is really embracing sound cinema. In fact, its use of the unseen approaches the medium of radio. It’s not, admittedly, as great as his silent sequences — the best bits of this film are more visual. But it’s funny and odd.

Ballroom — as seen in Syd’s colour home movies. All the women are blonde. Another planning session with Garbitsch. The Chaplinverse’s version of the Anschluss is prepared, and it involves Henikel going duck hunting — the set-up for the film’s final comedy of errors.

Brief comic dance with Madam Napaloni. We see more of this in Syd’s home movies, and I wish we had more of it here — it plays better in longshot, even in Syd’s makeshift compositions. “Can you see my feet?” was Chaplin’s most common question to his cameramen, and here we don’t. It’s a loss.

Next up — Napaloni’s last stand! (It was over too soon.)

Benzino Napaloni

When I try to Google “Benzino” to see what, if anything, it’s a reference to, all I get is some rapper.

What we get in THE GREAT DICTATOR is Jack Oakie as Benzino Napaloni dictator of Bacteria, who is Benito Mussolini dictator of Italy, a gift to the caricaturist. Oakie questioned why Chaplin didn’t hire an Italian. “What would be funny about that?”

The two got on well, but enjoyed some of the same competitiveness as their characters, with Oakie keen to upstage Chaplin. “If you want to upstage me, turn and look right into the camera,” advised Chaplin, “That’ll do it every time.”

First, Hynkel bestows another medal on Herring (Billy Gilbert) — this requires a long speech in Tomainian/Gibberish — I haven’t remarked yet that this is sort of a logical evolution from the nonsense song in MODERN TIMES, which was fake Italian/French/Esperanto. Fake German is used to introduce Chaplin’s more verbose characters here, as if to prove he doesn’t need words with meanings, and he lapses into it throughout. He seems to be almost the only one who uses his native tongue.

Billy Gilbert hyperventilates with emotion throughout this. Goering loved medals, and Hitler would keep inventing new ones. The result here is that the large Gilbert frontage is almost entirely occupied, and Heinkel has to hunt hard to find a bare spot, punching the needle right into his underling’s rib cage like Travolta giving Thurman the adrenalin shot.

Using people as objects is a big Chaplin trope, and so Heinkel, wanting to kiss Herring, seizes hold of his ears to move his head down into position, shoving his fat slobbery face away once he’s finished with it. A certain fellow-feeling forces most thesps to avoid using their fellow troupers this way, but Chaplin has no such fellow-feeling. He’s the big man here.

Herring’s place in the sun, such as it is, doesn’t last long. First he accidentally headbutts der Fooey when everyone’s bowing, then the news comes in that Napaloni’s preparing to invade Osterlich. Herring, having failed to foresee this, is immediately in disgrace, his medals plucked from his breast like feathers from a chicken. All with a tirade in Tomainian. This continues until even his buttons are ripped off and his uniform is falling apart in yards of sailcloth.

Notable that Chaplin isn’t moved to attack Stalin for the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. This squabble with Napaloni and its resolution is effectively the Chaplinverse version of that.

Just as Heinkel is signing a declaration of war against Bacteria, the man himself is on the phone. Advised to “be nice,” Garbitsch applies the oil. We learn that Napaloni, like all the world’s most evil men, is a keen golfer. Heinkel, like the Jewish barber minutes before, assumes mutism, in his case to avoid speaking with N — he is evidently a coward as well as a bully. “Just now he’s a little hoarse. No, I mean he can’t talk.” Now, this is a dreadful joke, but I like it. The pun is not good or clever but the idea that Napaloni should imagine that just now Heinkel is a small horse is a fantastically stupid idea.

Rather weak scenic painting at the railway station as Napaloni is awaited. The buildings are pure L.S. Lowrie. I like the sweep of the station ceiling though.

The return of the bland radio announcer: well, it’s a public occasion, the news media would be there. Rather than Wheeler Dryden as Heinrich Schtick, it’s the more reassured American narrator.

Problems with the train — involving special effects which are just good enough to get the gag across. We meet Napaloni, who is too proud to get out without a carpet, and his long-suffering wife. The mistreatment of Mrs. Napaloni is one of the film’s meaner gags, but as the wife of a fascist leader she surely doesn’t deserve TOO much sympathy.

Chaplin had originally planned to give Heinkel a wife, and he’d planned for Fanny Brice to play her. That would certainly have upset the Nazis. The gag would have been that Heinkel is too busy plotting world domination to sleep with his wife, who is going out of her mind with sexual frustration. Undercutting the Fuhrer’s masculinity is a good idea, but Chaplin probably couldn’t have gotten that kind of thing past the censor even if he’d wanted — it was all going to be suggestiveness with bananas and stuff.

It seems to me that Napaloni’s accent has more to do with Chico Marx’s accent than with any real Italian’s. Oakie wasn’t known as a dialect comedian so it’s not surprising his attempt at the voice should be slightly second-hand. It begs the question, why wasn’t Chico engaged for the part, but I guess he was contracted elsewhere. And having a bigger guy with a big round face seems important for this role — though I note with surprise that Oakie isn’t much taller than CC.

Grace Hayle, who plays Mrs N, WAS something of a dialect expert, going by her varied credits. She plays the permanently exhausted and overheated dictator’s wife quite sympathetically. Her suffering is just to reinforce how awful these men are.

The upstaging begins — Heinkel has been anxious to get some favourable photos taken, but Napaloni is as skilled at photobombing as he is with the regular kind of bombardment. Now we get almost literal upstaging, as the two rulers compete as to who is standing further back in frame, and thus gets to be full-face in shot. Claude Rains in a two-shot with Gloria Stuart, trying to turn it into a single. Olivier with Michael Caine. (Mankiewicz responded by shooting a single closeup on Caine as coverage, and Larry didn’t try it again.) In this case, Hynkel nearly winds up under the train.

It’s unusual to see Chaplin playing a character who comes off worst in interactions, but then it’s unusual to see him not playing the Tramp.

“Tomainia,” declares Napaloni. “Verr’ nice.”

TBC