Adolf hitler was, of course, guilty of many crimes, but it's tempting to think that what annoyed Charlie Chaplin the most was his appropriation of his trademark 'tache. This was Chaplin's first true talkie (and his biggest hit), and it's also an incredibly brave and progressive film that seems specifically designed to irritate Hitler personally.
Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber and a comically paranoid and ruthless dictator called Adenoid Hynkel; riffing on Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, each man is mistaken for the other. It's not just Hitler who gets mocked; Goebbels becomes Garbitsch, Mussolini becomes the buffoonish Napolini … it was, unsurprisingly, not released in Germany.
Made as the war got under way, Chaplin later said that had he known of the full extent of the Nazi horrors, he wouldn't have deemed them a laughing matter. But we can be thankful that he did: not only did this hammer Hitler's reputation, but it was also one of the first Hollywood films to tackle antisemitism.
In a climate of US isolationism, Chaplin' savagely funny film painted Hitler as someone to be mocked. It's a film that, particularly in its legendary closing speech, bares its teeth not only to smile but to bite.
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