Word: adenoid
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...terrifyingly comic Adenoid Hynkel (a takeoff on Hitler), whom Chaplin played in The Great Dictator, or M. Verdoux, the sardonic mass murderer of middle-aged women, may seem drastic departures from the "little fellow," but the Tramp is always ambivalent and many-sided. Funniest when he is most afraid, mincing and smirking as he attempts to placate those immune to pacification, constantly susceptible to reprogramming by nearby bodies or machines, skidding around a corner or sliding seamlessly from a pat to a shove while desire and doubt chase each other across his face, the Tramp is never unself-conscious, never...
...between silent and talking pictures as clearly as anything ever will. It's so much slower and more static than his silent features, and his persona does not translate well to sound. Once he began to talk, the Tramp was no longer very funny, but Chaplin's Hitler figure, Adenoid Hynckel, stumbled onto the fact that much of sound comedy has to do with an assault on the ear. The Dictator's nonsense talk strikes the viewer as brilliant from the moment he hears it. In fact, all the hostile humor in the picture strikes home, and the Hynckel sequences...
Several years later a group of Senators, headed by Isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, weighed The Great Dictator and found it wanton. The mustachioed Adenoid Hynkel, they concluded accurately, was none other than the Chancellor of Germany. The film was one of a number of movies, including Sergeant York and I Married a Nazi, that were under investigation. They were warmongering propaganda, theorized the Senate subcommittee; it was all engineered by the New Deal. With timing characteristic of the Old Right, the subcommittee chose to attack Chaplin in the fall of 1941. Three months later Charlie was again rescued, this time...
...America (The Age of the Moguls, The Yankee Exodus) often found the human side more interesting than the heroic, serving up such tidbits as Ethan Allen's incurable love of "stonewalls" (cider laced with rum) and the fact that Billy the Kid in real life was a bucktoothed adenoid case; of a stroke; in Portland...
...commission goes against us," said Mayor Moore, who is also the city magistrate, "we'll appeal. We'll get an injunction. We'll get everyone in Electra down to the station blowing whistles. We'll get a cowboy singer and have him give them an adenoid solo. We'll put up stoplights at the railroad crossings and make the trains obey them-if they break the law I'll fine...