The Great Dictator

In the early days of film making one of the biggest stars was Charlie Chaplin, he became one of the comedy kings of the silent film era, and when sound was added to film he didn't shrink away from this new dimension of entertainment. This film shows how great his acting truly is and that with or without sound he shows that he can entertain the audience and still get a moral social issue into the limelight. This is film is the story of the prince and the pauper story set in a European country of Tomania, ruled by the anti-Semitic ruler Adenoid Hynkel. Obviously the whole film is patented after Nazi Germany and the way it treated it's own Jewish people, and how the whole world was in the gun sights of Hitler.
When a Jewish barber is released from the hospital, 20 years after the War, he comes home to a society that is very anti-Semitic being lead by a ironfisted leader who looks remarkably like himself. The situations that are setup for examination are so close to the truth that it's amazing that it didn't drive the film into obscurity. The way that Chaplin blends the two versions of film making into one is just great, there are times that you can tell that the movie is playing off of the silent era, and others when it is obviously from the talking period of film. Both characters use this to their advantage, and amazingly enough both with the use of a musical sound track. The similarity in looks between the real Hitler and Chaplin's Little Tramp character was not lost on Chaplin and he uses it here to keep the prince and the pauper storyline in focus.
This is a remarkable piece of historical film making considering that it was openly made before America entered the war in '41, and a gave the watching audience a glimpse at what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Even though this film is a comedy it makes a powerful statement about the way things were happening over in Germany. To me this is one of Chaplin's best films, silent or talkie, he shows the audience the versatility of his acting and directing and brings to the viewing public, with some comedic prowess, the atrocities that were being committed in Europe at the time.