I don’t quite know how I managed to get this far in life without having seen Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” but saw it for the first time last night on TCM, the Turner Classic Movie cable channel as part of a Paulette Godard festival. Just before “The Great Dictator”, TCM aired “Modern Times”. In both films, Goddard played Chaplin’s love interest, appropriately enough since they were lovers off-screen. The casting choice of Goddard as a denizen of a Jewish ghetto in “The Great Dictator” was of some interest since she was born Marion Pauline Levy in Queens, NY to a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother although it is unlikely that her ethnicity was a factor. As for Chaplin, despite playing a Jewish barber in the film (as well as the look-alike dictator of Tomainia Adenoid Hynkel) and despite widespread impressions that he was Jewish, he was Christian.
Even if you have not seen it, you probably know the outlines of this militantly anti-fascist 1940 film. Chaplin plays an unnamed Jewish Tomainian soldier who saves the life of a pilot named Schultz during WWI. After their plane crashes, the injured barber is taken to a hospital where he is treated for 20 years, eventually recovering physically but still suffering from amnesia. He returns to his barber shop in the ghetto, totally unaware that his look-alike Hynkel has seized power and is planning pogroms. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/the-great-dictator/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
