Word: adenoid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...