50 Fun Facts About The Great Dictator

Which invented language, condemned by Hitler as a Jewish plot, appears on ghetto shop signs in The Great Dictator?

Esperanto was devised by a Polish Jew as a language for every nation, and Hitler attacked it as a scheme to destroy his country's culture.

In a famous scene of The Great Dictator, what does Hynkel dance with to music by Wagner?

A balloon globe is tossed, kicked and bounced off his head as Hynkel dreams of owning the world, until it bursts. The film's composer said the choice of music for the scene was Chaplin's own idea.

Until The Great Dictator, every Charlie Chaplin feature had done without which staple of 1930s Hollywood films?

Spoken dialogue had been standard for a decade, but Chaplin held out until he decided that talking was the best way to deliver a political message.

Which comedy team released a Hitler parody nine months before Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator reached cinemas?

The Three Stooges put Moe Howard on screen as a Hitler-like dictator named Moe Hailstone in the short You Nazty Spy!, released in January 1940.

Hannah, the heroine of The Great Dictator, was named after which person in Charlie Chaplin's own life?

His mother, Hannah Chaplin, was a music-hall singer whose voice and career failed when he was a boy. He gave her name to the brave young woman of the ghetto.

Charlie Chaplin read The Great Dictator's closing speech at a 1941 gala for which Franklin D. Roosevelt milestone?

His third inauguration, in January 1941, was marked by a gala where Chaplin delivered the speech in person. Roosevelt had earlier let it be known that he hoped Chaplin would not abandon the film.

Charlie Chaplin later said he could not have made The Great Dictator had he known the true extent of what?

The Holocaust changed how Chaplin saw his own comedy: in his 1964 autobiography he wrote that he could never have made fun of the Nazis' murderous insanity had he known.

Which comedy about a boy whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler is among the films The Great Dictator inspired?

Jojo Rabbit won Waititi an Oscar for its screenplay eight decades after Chaplin's satire. The Interview and Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator are counted among its descendants too.

In The Great Dictator, the barber shaves a customer in perfect time to a Hungarian Dance by which composer?

Johannes Brahms wrote the Hungarian Dance No. 5 that drives every stroke of the razor. Chaplin filmed the routine to a phonograph record, and the studio orchestra later had to match his movements.

What is the name of the fictional nation ruled by Hynkel in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator?

Tomainia is first seen losing the war of 1918, and by the time the barber leaves hospital twenty years later it has become Hynkel's dictatorship.

Benzino Napaloni, Hynkel's blustering rival in The Great Dictator, rules which comically named country?

Bacteria has a dictator who wants Osterlich for himself, which is why Hynkel must invite him on a state visit and sign a treaty before invading.

Osterlich, the peaceful neighbor Hynkel invades in The Great Dictator, is a thin disguise for which real country?

Austria is called Österreich in its own language, and the Nazis absorbed it in March 1938, while Chaplin was still developing his script.

Benzino Napaloni, the swaggering second dictator of The Great Dictator, is a broad parody of which real leader?

Benito Mussolini was known as Il Duce, so Chaplin gave his stand-in the mock title Diggaditchie, while the surname nods to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Garbitsch, Hynkel's icy right-hand man in The Great Dictator, is a caricature of which Nazi official?

Joseph Goebbels ran Nazi propaganda, the same job Garbitsch holds, and the character's name was chosen to sound like garbage.

Herring, Hynkel's bumbling war minister in The Great Dictator, is a caricature of which Nazi leader?

Hermann Göring is mocked through a minister whose new weapons keep failing; at one point a furious Hynkel rips every medal off his chest.

Which American comic actor earned an Oscar nomination for playing Napaloni in The Great Dictator?

Jack Oakie was in a career slump when Chaplin cast him, and the blustering Napaloni revived his career and brought him his only Oscar nomination.

Which actress, married to Charlie Chaplin at the time, plays Hannah in The Great Dictator?

Paulette Goddard and Chaplin never discussed their marriage in public, apart from his calling her his wife at the film's premiere. They divorced in 1942.

Billy Gilbert, who plays the war minister in The Great Dictator, also voiced which dwarf in Disney's Snow White?

Sneezy got his voice because Gilbert was famous for a routine built around one enormous sneeze, which made Walt Disney think of him at once.

After his plane crashes in the opening of The Great Dictator, the barber spends twenty years with which condition?

Amnesia keeps him in hospital for two decades, so he walks back to his shop with no idea that Hynkel has taken power.

In The Great Dictator, what is Hynkel doing in civilian clothes when his own troops mistake him for the barber?

Duck hunting was his cover story, a country holiday meant to hide the coming invasion of Osterlich. Instead it gets the dictator knocked out and locked in his own prison camp.

In The Great Dictator, Hannah and the Jaeckels flee the ghetto for which kind of home in Osterlich?

A vineyard belonging to Mr Jaeckel's brother is their refuge, and Hannah writes to the barber about how beautiful Osterlich is shortly before Hynkel's troops arrive.

In The Great Dictator, why does Hynkel briefly ease his persecution of the ghetto midway through the story?

He wants a banker's loan to pay for his war machine, and the only man who might lend is Jewish. When the financier refuses, the purge returns worse than before.

Which emblem, worn by Hynkel's stormtroopers, takes the place of the swastika in The Great Dictator?

A double cross, drawn as two X shapes, lets Chaplin brand the whole regime with a pun on betrayal.

In a one-upmanship gag in The Great Dictator, what do Hynkel and Napaloni each keep raising to tower over the other?

Their barber chairs rise turn by turn as each dictator tries to look down on the other. Bugs Bunny later paid homage to the gag in a 1950 Looney Tunes cartoon.

In The Great Dictator, what is hidden in a pudding to pick the man who must blow up Hynkel's palace?

A coin was supposed to mark one volunteer, but Hannah sabotages the plan by slipping one into every pudding, leaving the barber to swallow several in silence.

Hannah fights off stormtroopers in The Great Dictator by hitting them over the head with which kitchen item?

A frying pan swung from her window floors the troopers, but one stray blow also catches the barber, who staggers the length of the street in a daze.

The opening battle of The Great Dictator shows the barber helping to fire a giant cannon with which nickname?

Big Bertha is aimed at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, but its first shell flattens a nearby outhouse and the second barely leaves the barrel.

In The Great Dictator's opening escape flight, the barber and Schultz fail to notice their plane is doing what?

Flying upside down, the pair puzzle over a sun that seems to shine from below while a pocket watch floats up on its chain.

How do Schultz and the barber disguise themselves to escape the prison camp in The Great Dictator?

As army officers in stolen uniforms, they walk right into the invasion force, where the barber is taken for the dictator he resembles.

Hynkel's ranting rally speeches in The Great Dictator mock Hitler's oratory by being delivered in what?

German-sounding gibberish let Chaplin copy the rhythm and fury of the newsreels he had studied while saying nothing at all, apart from the odd food word such as sauerkraut.

Hynkel's dance of world conquest in The Great Dictator is set to the prelude from which Wagner opera?

Lohengrin returns at the very end, when Hannah listens to the barber's plea for freedom, so the same music serves both tyranny and hope.

Meredith Willson, Chaplin's partner on The Great Dictator's Oscar-nominated score, later wrote which Broadway musical?

The Music Man made Willson famous in 1957, yet he insisted that the best musical ideas in the 1940 film had come from Chaplin himself.

Which Alfred Hitchcock film beat The Great Dictator to the top prize at the 1941 Academy Awards?

Rebecca took the award for Outstanding Production, and Chaplin's satire went home empty-handed from all five of its nominations.

Which star of The Philadelphia Story beat Charlie Chaplin to the Best Actor Oscar in the year of The Great Dictator?

James Stewart won for playing a magazine reporter in the comedy, on a night when Chaplin was also nominated as the writer and producer of his film.

Which institution chose The Great Dictator for the National Film Registry in 1997 as a culturally significant work?

The Library of Congress adds up to 25 films a year to the registry, and it has also chosen earlier Chaplin classics such as The Kid and City Lights.

Which Hollywood gossip columnist attacked The Great Dictator in print and later campaigned to have Chaplin deported?

Hedda Hopper worked against Chaplin alongside her friend Hoover, the FBI director, and in 1952 Chaplin's permit to re-enter the United States was revoked.

Writer Konrad Bercovici took Charlie Chaplin to court in 1947 over The Great Dictator, alleging what?

Plagiarism was the charge: Bercovici said the idea of Chaplin playing a dictator was his. Chaplin settled for $95,000 while insisting that he alone had written the script.

What made the behind-the-scenes footage Sydney Chaplin shot on the set of The Great Dictator so unusual?

It was in color, a rare glimpse of how the sets and costumes of the black-and-white film really looked. The reels resurfaced in a 2002 documentary about the production.

Neville Chamberlain's government vowed to ban The Great Dictator, in keeping with which policy toward Hitler?

Appeasement had collapsed by the time the film was finished: Britain was at war, and the comedy was welcomed there as useful propaganda.

In 2002 The Great Dictator was chosen as the closing film of which city's international film festival?

Berlin gave the film that honor 62 years after its release, a few hundred yards from the bunker where Hitler died. In 1931 the city's crowds had mobbed Chaplin, which annoyed the Nazis.

The Great Dictator's world premiere needed two neighboring theaters, the Capitol and the Astor, in which city?

New York demand was so high that the film opened in both theaters at once in October 1940, and it went on to become the biggest money-maker of Chaplin's career.

Which Charlie Chaplin film, his last before The Great Dictator, let audiences hear his voice for the first time?

Modern Times has Chaplin singing a nonsense song, a first taste of the mock languages he would use four years later as Hynkel.

At the end of The Great Dictator, how does Hannah come to hear the barber's speech from far away?

Over the radio his voice reaches her after Hynkel's troops have beaten her, and the film ends as she turns her face toward the rising sunlight.

During the closing speech of The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin drops the barber's character and looks where?

Straight into the camera is where he pleads against war and fascism, an ending that stirred controversy in 1940 and has become the film's most famous sequence.

In the closing speech of The Great Dictator, the barber calls on people to unite in the name of which ideal?

Democracy and liberty are the causes he urges soldiers to fight for, a bold message at a time when the United States was officially neutral.

Chaplin's assistants on The Great Dictator struggled to make him leave which other ruler out of the closing speech?

Joseph Stalin struck Chaplin as a dangerous dictator very early, one of his assistants recalled, and the Soviet pact with Hitler in 1939 horrified him.

Charlie Chaplin added 'Great' to The Great Dictator's title because which studio already owned the shorter name?

Paramount Pictures had bought a play called The Dictator and wanted $25,000 for the name, so Chaplin simply lengthened his own title.

Which black comedy about a wife-murdering bank clerk was Charlie Chaplin's next film after The Great Dictator?

Monsieur Verdoux arrived in 1947 and became the first Chaplin release to fail with both critics and audiences in the United States.

Which Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film did Charlie Chaplin watch repeatedly to mimic Hitler for The Great Dictator?

Triumph of the Will horrified the director René Clair when the two men watched it together, but Chaplin roared with laughter and kept going back to study it.

In which newly liberated country did The Great Dictator become the most popular film of 1945?

France had been unable to see the film under occupation, and when it finally opened there it sold more than eight million tickets.