Speech!

We’re finally there!

The visuals can be disposed of quickly. Chaplin, the Jewish barber, stands cap in hand before the microphones. But once the speech starts, Chaplin the director cuts to a tight head-and shoulders, and mainly stays on it.

A cutaway to Hannah allows him to break the shot and we return to a wider one, but a dramatic push-in as he ramps up his fervour once more takes us close. Crowd shot, dissolve to Hannah, then a series of closeups of the two, separated by distance but united by some psychic connection, perhaps — yes, love.

As Costa-Gavras points out, the simplicity is deceptive. They key thing Chaplin does with his framing, apart from creating intimacy with his audience (that of a talking actor, not a silent comic) is to exclude all the apparatus of Tomainian Nazism. The double cross armband is framed out. To Cost-Gavras, far from being uncinematic (a big talking scene) this is the essence of cinema. As Scorsese puts it, cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s not.

Chaplin was at continual war with his assistants about the speech. These conflicts were often productive — Chaplin only gave in when he was genuinely convinced, and have you ever noticed how impossible it is to convince anyone of anything? And yet, he did occasionally make chances. The crew was his first audience, after all.

Chaplin’s argument was that the speech was what the Jewish barber WOULD say, if he were given such a chance. Which is odd, because Chaplin doesn’t even bother to use the barber’s voice, that rather high-pitched, quick style of delivery. And there’s been no indication that the barber is a political thinker: he did, after all, describe Hynkel as “Most amusing,” when the raids on the ghetto were paused.

This is Chaplin speaking, as impressively as he can. Having played two roles throughout the film, then effectively merging them as the barber is mistaken for the dictator, he now drops both masks and makes the speech HE would make if given the chance. You can see him making speeches to raise money for war bonds in WWI and he’s similarly impassioned. And presumably didn’t believe a word he was saying.

Chaplin/the barber begins by suicidally dropping his Hynkel guise, or almost. He doesn’t want to be an emperor. He’d like to help everyone if possible. “We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.” Says the man standing before the lightly fictionalized Nazi army. The thing is, he’s not wrong, which is why his words are touching. But whatever you can say about humanity, the opposite also seems to be true. It’s why the Chaplin-Hitler dichotomy is so effective here.

“Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.” Chaplin returns to the themes of MODERN TIMES — he sees that the form of modern society that turns people into cogs in a machine is slavery, inhuman. He may not have recognized the similarity between communism and capitalism — whether you’re being oppressed by the state or by business may not make much difference — but he’s instinctively an anarchist anyway.

“We think too much and feel too little.” I never liked this line, in this context. One thing you can’t say about Nazism, it seems to me, is that it’s overly intellectual and lacks emotion. Rather, the appeal is to the gut. What Chaplin means by “feel, ” I think, is “show empathy,” at which point the line starts to work. And the kind of empathy that’s needed is true, universal empathy. No doubt the Nazis considered themselves empathetic, loved their children. But they closed off fellow-feeling, limited who could be considered their fellow.

“Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world -” a useful reminder which cues the first shot of Hannah.

“To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.” All this harping on greed. Hynkel is greedy, I suppose — he lusts for the world. But a lot of this speech is anti-capitalist more than anti-Nazi. And J. Edgar Hoover is in the audience, furiously taking notes. Chaplin will be allowed to make two more films on American soil.

“Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel!” Ah yes. Necessary to address the actual, physical audience. Chaplin actually filmed shots of Tomainian soldiers putting down their rifles and dancing together. Maybe his assistants’ objections were sufficiently strong on that occasion, or maybe Chaplin didn’t want to cut away from himself. I think it’s important we don’t see too much how the speech is received. Chaplin has done what he has so often done — he did it in THE KID and CITY LIGHTS particularly — he has taken the story to an impasse, where it can end on a note of high, positive emotion, but it is impossible to convincingly or dramatically imagine what comes next. The film is forced to stop.

“Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!” Again with the machines. If we think back to the WWI stuff, Chaplin dwarfed himself with big guns and put himself in a plane — war was the work of machinery, just as industry was in MODERN TIMES. It makes the spot gags with Hynkel’s inventors more relevant than we might have thought: the dictator is a modern man, keen to enlist all the latest scientific developments in his brutal advance. “We’ve just discovered the most wonderful poison gas,” gushed Herring. “It will kill EVERYONE!”

“Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural!” I don’t know if CC read Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, but it’s perfectly possible. “In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation.” The book was published in Germany in 1933, and immediately burned. Not sure about English translation, though.

“In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!” OK, he mentioned the deity. And pushes in dramatically, a very rare thing for Chaplin, as he does so. “Pour religion on everything, like catsup,” is Lee Tracy’s advice in THE BEST MAN. It always truck me as weird, as my school attempted to indoctrinate me (no separation of church and state here) that the one true universal religion was followed only by a small minority of human beings. Saying that God is inside all humans is, sort of, nice and inclusive. Or maybe colonialist? Perhaps the Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, don’t WANT that foreign God inside them? But Chaplin’s use of the idea is as benign as it can be made to be — if there’s any truth in this stuff, it should unite rather than divide us.

“You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.” Yes, and what do we choose to do with this power instead?

“Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. “Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!” This is part of the trouble. Chaplin is saying all the right things, but he recognizes that others have made these promises, without any intention of even trying to achieve them.

“Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance.” “How the world dearly loves a cage,” as Maude says in HAROLD AND MAUDE. Freedom of movement has always seemed crucial to me. Now it’s the big thing UK political leaders can win support by promising to abolish. When I was a kid I proposed to my socialist big brother that the nations of the earth should be free to run any forms of government they wanted, so long as their people were free to travel to pick the one they wanted to live under. He was appalled by my naivety. “That wouldn’t solve anything!” I still slightly suspect he was the one being naive, in believing that things get solved.

“Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!” Chaplin’s treatment of the speech’s reception is very clever. We need to see SOMETHING, I guess, so when he finishes his speech on a grand climax followed by an uncertain look, he fades up the sound of mass cheering — Chaplin looks VERY uncertain as to how he feels about this popular adulation, as well he should — and cuts to a stock shot panning across a vast, undifferentiated throng. Doesn’t look like a crowd in uniform. It’s just a sea of humanity. So that the Tomainian troops have been stripped of their military costumes and turned back into human beings. We can certainly agree that avoiding using recognizable TRIUMPH OF THE WILL footage was a good call. But using stock footage per se was also smart — it enhances the feeling of cardboard flimsiness, it separates the fictional world from our own, because this is a kind of dream ending.

Chaplin did consider dissolving from here to the barber waking up in his concentration camp, which would have been very strong. NOBODY wanted to see that. It would have been, in a way, more true and tasteful, but in 1940 Britain, having urged Chaplin not to make the year before, was now clamouring for a propaganda feature, and Chaplin gave it to them — in his own manner.

“Look up, Hannah!” The bit of the speech which is mysteriously chopped off so often.

“Listen,” says Hannah, looking up and listening after the speech has ended, and only Chaplin’s music is playing.

Nobody talks about that. Everybody says the film ends with a big long speech. “It needed to be said,” said Sidney Lumet, dismissing the carping that it was too on the nose. “Everything doesn’t have to be perfect.” Which is true, but the film doesn’t exactly end on a big speech. It ends on a woman listening, to silence, or to non-diegetic music somehow only she can hear, or to something else that we can’t hear. Not yet, anyway.

Escape, Capture, Escape

Short-lived bids for freedom in THE GREAT DICTATOR (cont).

A man hurries down the street, filmed from what looks like much the same high angle used earlier. Chaplin pulls off a rare (for him) Langian linkage, from everyone saying “Good night” in the previous scene, to the rushing informant here saying “Good morning.”

Word is out (somehow — doesn’t matter how) that Schultz is hiding in the ghetto. The Jewish barber is also wanted for questioning.

(I may have told this one before — reputedly genuine Nazi-era joke. A comedian had been making jokes about the regime — maybe the one about Hitler having a cheese named after him? — and is ordered to report to Gestapo HQ for questioning. He reports to the front desk and they ask him, “Do you have any offensive weapons?” He answers, “Why, will I need them?”)

Comedy business with Chaplin hiding in a small tea-chest (looks undercranked but isn’t), to the surprise of Mr. Mann (Bernard Gorcey).

The Jewish barber is sent to alert Schultz but reverts to silent comedy form under stress — he can’t get the words out. He does it in pantomime, but Reginald Gardner is not a fellow silent comedian so he doesn’t understand. “Did you tell him?” asks Hannah. “Yes,” says Chaplin, hilariously. It’s a slightly abstract humour — I mean, it isn’t funny just because it’s not true. Many things are not true, but not many things are funny. It seems to be funny because it’s OBVIOUSLY untrue and SORT OF true at the same time. Somehow that makes The J.b.’s “Yes” even more wrong.

Business with getting all Schultz’s things together so they can hide on the roof and leave no incriminating traces. Obviously they have to take Schultz’s golf clubs because they would be a dead giveaway. This leads to the J.b teetering on a roof beam out over the street, a hatbox obscuring his vision. This is almost a straight reprise of the blindfolded rollerskating by a ledge in MODERN TIMES. Engages the audience’s poignancy-dramatic irony-Oh no! factor.

I don’t know if Chaplin decided that the terror of high places was too useful a comic device to leave to Harold Lloyd, or if he saw this as a contest he could win. Quite a lot of Chaplin sequences use vertigo peril… THE GOLD RUSH and THE CIRCUS also have high-up suspense sequences. Lloyd tends to win on thrills because his staging is more convincing. Keaton beats all because he wasn’t, it seemed, overly concerned about dying. But Keaton doesn’t milk the mortal peril aspect as avidly as Lloyd.

At any rate, the Jewish barber is saved from a nasty plunge but manages to drop most of Schultz’s possessions into the street. Poor Schultz goes through a rapid loss of personal possessions, sort of like the divesting undergone by Monroe in RIVER OF NO RETURN or Tallulah in LIFEBOAT. Oddly, the heavy falling objects do not alert the stormtroopers. Best not to worry about that.

Nicely thought-out gag where the J.b. falls through a skylight into a bed, apologizes to the tenants, tries to leave by the door, is spotted by stormtroopers, retreats back into the flat, and is grabbed from above by fresh stormtroopers, who have also nabbed Schultz. The potential chase sequence is over before it started. Some strong angles here, but they’re not bravura touches for the sake of showing off, the low angles are pretty well naturally forced upon the camera by the situation.

Walking in step stuff at the prison camp. We can’t really call it a concentration camp because the cruelty involved was beyond Chaplin’s imagination at the time, probably beyond most people’s. The UK is running concentration camps now. Do we fail to revolt against this because we consider these sufficiently different in type or severity, or because we think it’s OK to concentrate the right kind of people, or because our imaginations fail us?

The Jewish barber goes to sleep. The cue for what was, at one point, going to be the cruelest twist ending in cinema: after the big speech at the end, he would WAKE UP, back in his prison camp bed, never having escaped. It would have been very strong. In a sense, it might have made the film even more relevant in a post-war world. But in 1940 it might have been intolerable.

Meanwhile, Hannah and her friends escape to Osterlich, where there are vineyards and a bucolic idyll of the SUNNYSIDE variety, only shorter. We know they’re not safe.

And now we return you to the palace of Adenoid Hynkel, awaiting a guest…

TO BE CONTINUED

The Fatal Pudding

I’ve written before about this recurring thing in Chaplin — metal in the mouth, choking.

As a tiny child, Chaplin tried to imitate a trick big brother Syd showed him, apparently swallowing a coin, but little Charlie took the trick literally, popped a penny in his gob and almost choked to death, saved only by mother Hannah’s timely application of the East End Heimlich, which involves lifting the sufferer by the ankles and pounding his back, newborn-style. We can assume the experience formed what the Scientologists call an engram, a compressed diamond of experience, in which the concepts of metal taste, choking, and performance became fused and permanently associated at a subconscious level.

See here for the breakdown. This motif turns up A LOT.

This is the most literal rendition of the idea. A one-scene subplot that goes nowhere — Schultz, hiding in the ghetto, an inverted Anne Frank, persuades his hosts to take part in a gunpowder plot, blowing up Heinkel’s palace. The lucky suicide bomber will be selected by the distribution of puddings, in one of which a coin is to be concealed. Hannah (Paulette Goddard, here named after Ma Chaplin), sabotage’s the plan by hiding a coin in every pudding.

The bomb plot may well derive from Guy Fawkes, and the coin-in-pudding theme is another bit of British culture (I think – does anyone else do this?). The Great British Christmas pudding traditionally conceals a penny — one lucky diner wins the jackpot and possibly a broken tooth. Chaplin always hated Christmas because it reminded him of the workhouse — another engram.

The dinner scene begins mid-track-and-pan, the camera sweeping across the table. When Schultz is revealed, standing at one end, something disc-shaped is swaying behind him — evidently a dinner gong has just been struck, but Chaplin has decided to cut this, rendering the scene’s start a little ragged.

The sequence is scored like a dance. Three of the Jewish barber’s co-conspirators find coins and transfer them to their neighbour’s pudding. The barber ends up with all of them, and his method of subterfuge is to swallow them down with a swig of water. Then the honourable Mr. Jaeckel declares that HE has the coin, and the barber’s all come back on him, hiccuping out of his mouth and chinking onto his plate.

Chaplin simplifies his set-up by arraying all the plotters along one side of the table, like The Last Supper. The camera plays a more significant role than in most of Chaplin’s comedy scenes — panning from one coin-shifter to another, pushing in from three-shot to one-shot, panning off the serious Mr. Jaeckel’s serious announcement to the barber’s comic digestive interruption.

Since Chaplin seems to take Hannah’s part, opposing direct action of this kind, this scene allows Schultz to be even more of an ass than usual. He tells his reluctant terrorist cell that the pudding idea derives from an ancient Aryan custom. He starts to say “Hail Hynkel!” then breaks off with a bathetic “Oh, what am I saying?” He gets very stuff when meek Mr. Agar questions why he isn’t going on the mission himself. (“If it’s a question of my honour, this is most embarrassing…”)

Chaplin liked Reginald Gardner, who plays Schultz and perfectly nails his combination of genuine nobility and stuffed-shirt nationalist psychopathy. He didn’t, apparently, care for Henry Daniell. A shame. HD, being classically trained, slightly awed Chaplin, who didn’t feel comfortable giving him notes. If Garbitsch was meant to be funnier, I think it’s fine that he didn’t turn out that way — he ends up embodying the evil of Nazism, which Heinkel can’t quite do because he has to personify the absurdity and insanity of it. It’s OK to hate Garbitsch — you can’t precisely hate Heinkel because you have to be able to laugh at him. And recognize that he’s crazy in a way that Garbitsch isn’t. Not that you LIKE him — but you welcome his appearances.

Pay-off, topping the topper — once the assassination is called off, the frugal barber carefully pockets all his regurgitated coins. A pocketful of sticky pennies.