The validity of a classic – Daily Day

Charles Chaplin was already a star when, in 1939, began with the filming of “The Great Dictator”. However, his fame had given the dumb humorous cinema, a universe that was in a tailspin.

In “Modern Times” (1936), Chaplin had begun to use dialogues by public pressure when they had been nine years since the beginning of talkies with “The Jazz Singer”. But the actor and director still refused to abandon their characters speechless and did his first full talkie to “The Great Dictator”.

Despite their fears, the film showed his film work equally well with words without them and even the final speech that the dictator Tomania (Chaplin) is considered one of the best, most eloquent and accurate, history of cinema.

It was the end of a film that Chaplin wanted to do to show the world the considerable increase in the repression of Jews by the Nazis.

And could not be more visionary Charlie, who began shooting the film just a week after the start of World War II, but years later would recognize that the scale of the drama that was to come was never imagined.

In 1964, in his autobiography, the British filmmaker said even that would not have made the movie to have known the true extent of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. But in 1938, when Chaplin began writing the script, he could not imagine what would happen.

Chaplin took nearly two years to complete the script and at that time also took the opportunity to study each movement and gesture of Hitler, whom he based his dictator. He did watching all the films and documentaries images found for a perfect imitation of his style and way of speaking.

A LONG BREAK

With him were Jack Oakie, Regianald Gardinier and it was his third wife, Paulette Goddard, with whom she starred in heated arguments during filming, mainly because the actress He was beginning to be known and liked neither his small role or the unglamorous clothes they should wear as her character, Hannah, was a poor Jew who lived in the Ghetto.

Other than that and the desire perfectionist Chaplin, filming took place normally but very long by the standards of the time, almost six months, until March 1940. The final budget was 1.5 million, almost entirely departed Pocket director after the refusal of the studies to finance due to the pressures of diplomacy both Germany and Italy, as in England and even the United States.

The main stumbling block before Release your -more than being a direct criticism of Hitler was the end of the film, the pacifist discourse of Jewish barber who believe it is the dictator. Partners Chaplin considered lastraría the result of the film at the box office, but the director was adamant about the possibility of deleting it.

There were also doubts about the success of the film as it approached -the premier was the premiere in New York on 15 October 1940 because there were surveys saying that 96 percent of Americans opposed US involvement in the war in Europe and Chaplin also received threatening letters Nazi sympathizers.

But the film was very well received by both audiences and critics, who considered the second best in this 1940, only behind “The Grapes of Wrath “and he won five Oscar nominations, but none is brought.