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.

Most amusing

THE GREAT DICTATOR, continued.

With carefully dreadful dramatic efficiency, the Jewish barber’s date with Hannah (Paulette Goddard) coincides with the state’s decision to start persecuting the Jews again. The same terrible story logic prevails in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF where a pogrom interrupts one of the daughters’ weddings. Efficient storytelling can seem rather crass in the face of real world horrors.

And everyone was having such a nice time. “That Hynkel isn’t such a bad fellow after all,” observes Hannah, before things kick off. “Most amusing,” agrees the barber, who at this stage in the narrative is not a deep political thinker, but is it seems a student of comedy.

The ghetto’s Hynkel button salesman is doing a roaring trade. Charlie orders two with a finger gesture known in the UK as a rude sign akin to “flipping the bird,” and reversed by Churchill a little later as the V for Victory sign.

When Hynkel starts broadcasting his antisemitic Tomainian bile through the loudspeakers, we dissolve to a big closeup with vaguely radiographic shadows behind him. This noir treatment isn’t pursued much elsewhere, as Hynkel has to appear at least as absurd as he is threatening, but when his words directly threaten the other Chaplin character, he has to be taken seriously. Such is the movie’s balancing act.

The barber returns the two buttons.

The button salesman is uncredited and though there are several ambiguous IMDb credits like “Ghetto man”, it’s not clear who he is. He looks a bit like Chaplin’s brother Syd, though, who was around shooting colour home movies of the set. Anyone else think it could be him?

Hynkel’s hate speech clears the ghetto like those bits in westerns when a duel is imminent. As Charlie and Paulette run for cover, the speech accelerates along with them, a witty and inventive touch that shows how deft Chaplin could be with sound. We can be glad he spent his whole youth in silent cinema, but if talkies had hit sooner I reckon he’d have given us even more audiovisual slapstick like this.

When the barber drops his derby, he goes back for it in the best Indiana Jones manner, and it becomes a kind of terrifying schoolyard game — as Hynkel’s rant drops in volume, Charlie is tempted to tiptoe towards the fallen hat, but then Hynkel suddenly shrieks louder and he scuttles to perceived safety.

A nice bit of “He’s behind me, isn’t he?” and a neat stormtrooper dodge, and then we dissolve into an even more alarming ECU of the dictator. There can’t be many ECUs in Chaplin’s oeuvre — I’m tempted to suggest this is the first. Correct me if you have another candidate.

It feels very much like a Karl Struss shot, rather than a Rollie Totheroh shot.

I just acquired Chaplin’s book My Life in Pictures, which is really good. It has this impressive still of Hynkel. It’s striking how seldom he appears like this in the movie, a scary, demonic maniac. He’s always somewhat alarming, of course, but Chaplin wants to give him the reductio ad absurdum treatment. Emphasizing his menace would probably have just flattered the Nazis. (We don’t know what Hitler thought of the film, though we’re told he ran it twice. He must have found it at least interesting, but he couldn’t have felt flattered by it.)

The arrival of more stormtroopers singing their moronic song — perhaps not fully understanding the Nazi threat, Chaplin stated that his main motivation in making the film was to mock the absurd racial claims of superiority — this arrival provokes Chaplin into some dramatic crane movement, hoisting the camera up as the protags retreat into their courtyard, then swooping down on Hannah as she dissolves into hysterics. Supposedly Chaplin had never seen a camera crane before 1939 and thought it was a new invention, but we do see some high angle movement in MODERN TIMES which must have been achieved with a crane. (It’s possible I’m misremembering a MT anecdote as a TGD one.)

As Mr. Jaeckel takes charge, the microphone boom sweeps through shot, apparently escaping everyone’s notice. The day is saved by Commander Schultz’s orders that the residents of this building shouldn’t be molested. I have fun at Schultz’s expense but we can be grateful for his intervention.

Seeing off the last of the stormtroopers, Chaplin executes a perfect Del Boy lean-and-fall gag.

As the barbershop is torched, our protags retreat to the rooftop, watching the miniature inferno via the miracle of rear projection. The illusion is pretty convincing in the daylight scene, less so at night, though adding some fire sound effects might have helped.

The two brief rooftop scenes are divided by a shot of Hynkel at the piano, clearly meant to echo Nero.

Mr Jaeckel, the film’s humanist info-dump, arrives to announce that Schultz is hiding out in the cellar, a fugitive from Hynkel: he’s gone from being the Schindler type good Tomainian to some topsy-turvy Anne Frank. Before either of those people had been heard of.

TO BE CONTINUED