Word: chaplinitis
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...Chaplin's previous hits have been pearls of assorted humor strung on a thread of personality-the personality of an ineffectual, half pathetic, half grotesque, wholly sympathetic little comedian. The Great Dictator has enough pearls but no thread...
Satire in all its refinements and lack of refinement also went into the pot-crude take-offs on a dictator's pretensions and occupations, neat bits such as a radio commentator's translation of the dictator's oration of hate, one magnificent scene in which Dictator Chaplin lifts a globe of the world from a stand in his office and does a bubble dance, exquisite and grotesque...
Pathos, as good as any Chaplin put into The Kid, goes in too-the homely lives of the Jews in the Ghetto, the naïve pleasures of the little barber's scrubgirl friend (Mr. Chaplin's Paulette Goddard...
Melodrama is also included, for the first time, by Scriptwriter Chaplin-storm troopers as brutal, a dictator as pathologically ruthless, as human sadism could desire...
Through no fault of Chaplin's, during the two years he was at work on the picture dictators became too sinister for comedy. He probably intended to do an uproarious farce on dictatorship, or an amusing story of a shy little man who finds himself in a dictator's shoes. He ended by also doing an arraignment of the megalomania of dictatorship and the pathology of race hatred. Result: Chaplin the comedian and Chaplin the lover of democracy together run dictator-wild...