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"The devil cannot stand to be mocked." The intro revisits Shoulder Arms in the light of Modern Times, Big Bertha aims at Notre Dame but hits an outhouse, the fog of war is literalized with the hapless bayoneteer marching into a haze only to emerge among doughboys. The Jewish soldier nurses his amnesia while the antisemitic despot rises to power, it goes unremarked that they look like each other and that both look like Charles Chaplin. "And I always thought of you as an Aryan." "I'm a vegetarian." Der Phooey of Tomainia, bending microphones with torrents of mock-German indistinguishable from coughing fits, pausing his inflamed rhetoric for applause and to pour water down his trousers. His gentle doppelgänger heads back to the disused barbershop in the ghetto and falls for the spirited maiden next door (Paulette Goddard), their shared dream persists in the face of persecution from the "medieval maniac" in charge. "We'll get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the brunettes." Chaplin's roasting of Hitler remains the medium's boldest gesture of faith in satirical resistance, as well as its greatest trademark infringement lawsuit. (Underpinning the impassioned agitprop is the Borgesian joke of a pair of megalomaniacs fighting over a mustache.) The totalitarian aesthetic means a saluting arm for the Venus de Milo, diplomacy boils down to struggling to one-up the fellow tyrant whose trains don't run on time (Jack Oakie). "Napaloni, der grosse peanut, der cheesy ravioli." Dizzy with grandiosity, the bullying shrimp savors a ballet with the globe that he longs to conquer. "Most amusing," this caricature, and then his fulminating rants emanate from loudspeakers and the sense of danger hangs as viscerally as in Lang. The switcheroo at the podium allows for what Godard would deem the invention of cinéma-vérité, a peroration from a graying mime that yields to a sustained close-up of hope as embodied by his innamorata and named after his mother. "Look up!" Losey provides the nightmare version in Mr. Klein. With Henry Daniell, Reginald Gardiner, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovich, Emma Dunn, Bernard Gorcey, and Chester Conklin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |