The Great Dictator (1940)

Perhaps even more than his ground breaking short work, The Great Dictator is Charlie Chaplin's most important and daring work. At the time when world leaders, never mind Hollywood studio bosses were reluctant to annoy Hitler, Chaplin had the guts not only to put his reputation and money on the line, but to make the end product largely free from pious moralising, instead going for the giant raspberry in the face of the despot.

The plot is a slightly contrived piece of farce. Chaplin plays a barber (unnamed, just like his tramp character), from the fictional country of Tomania. During military service during the First World War, he saves the life of Schultz, a German pilot, crashing a plane and giving himself amnesia for 20 years. He eventually returns to his barber shop, only to find that a dictator, Hynkel, who is also a dead ringer for the barber, has come to power, and his goons are sweeping through the country's ghettos, smashing up businesses and rounding up Jews. The barber ends up in a concentration camp, from which escapes, just in time for Hynkel to suffer a mishap on a boat which ends with him in the camp and leaves the world with a serious case of mistaken identity.

The film largely consists of set pieces, featuring some of Chaplin's best physical comedy, much of it dialogue free as well, such as the graceful dance with the balloon, the hair raising plane ride to freedom, and the running gag involving confusion over the correct salute. Chaplin's reputation as a perfectionist is well deserved judging from the elaborate staging and construction of the scenes.

Special mention also needs to go to Jack Oakie, who plays a thinly disguised version of Mussolini, Benzini Napaloni, the ruler of neighbouring Bacteria. The state visit is an increasingly ridiculous exercise in one upmanship, with a misbehaving train carriage, uneven furniture, and a barber chair gag that predates the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rabbit of Seville.

The film only really comes unstuck at the very end, when the barber, impersonating Hynkel, takes to the microphone to deliver a heartfelt three minute monologue to the assembled crowd, both on screen and those sitting in the cinema. There is very little to find fault with in the content, a plea for kindness and humanity in the face of industrialisation and war, and a reassurance to those suffering under Hynkel/Hitler that freedom will eventually prevail. As a standalone piece it is certainly moving and stirring, however as part of the film, the speech jars with the style and content of that which has preceded it and moves towards the earnest lecturing Chaplin had avoided up to then.

Your perception of the film's success as a satire may depend on how you personally define satire. Other than the climax, rather than hand-wringing or over intellectualising Chaplin is more interested in showing Hynkel to be a stupid buffoon. He spent a lot of time studying and aping Hitler's mannerisms and speech patterns, and clearly wanted the audience to link their scornful laughter at Hynkel with their attitudes to Hitler. However, writing some years later in his autobiography, Chaplin said that could not have made the film if he had known at the time of the true horror of the Holocaust. While understandable, this would have been a great shame and a great loss to the world. Despots are invariably humourless, and fully deserve to have a raspberry blown in their faces. It may not bring them down, but it may make a chink in their armour, and sometimes, as Mark Twain once said, the human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

The Producers (1967)

A classic piece of 1960s madness, The Producers also kick-started the film-directing career of Mel Brooks. Viewed nowadays, it has two perfect lead actors, and a frantic neurotic energy that helps smooth over the bumps in the script.

After a string of Broadway flops, producer Max Bialystock (the incomparable Zero Mostel) is as desperate as he is broke. Just when all hope seems lost, his timid accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) inadvertently comes up with a fool proof money making scheme: find the worst show in the world, raise a huge budget by fraudulently overselling it to your investors, watch it close on first night, then flee to Rio with the leftover cash. However, even with a high kicking, seig heiling, musical about the life of Hitler, they forgot to take into account the questionable taste of the theatre-going public.

Brooks came into movies from a career writing skits for the likes of the legendary Sid Ceaser, and this shows in the script structure. Much of the first 20 minutes takes place in the office of Bialystok, and, consequently, feels a little stagey. In fairness to Brooks, this may be due to budgetary restrictions as much as anything, and after this he does try to expand the feel of the piece into something more cinematic, with montage trip around some of the sights of New York.

The characters and the writing are what really make The Producers work, rather than flashy filmmaking. Based on Brooks’ own experiences of working with Broadway producers, Max is one of the great monstrous comic creations, utterly devoted to nobody but himself, yet, thanks to the writing and Mostel's performance, we can actually begin to understand his desperation at how far he has fallen, to the extent where it is very easy to want him to succeed in his fraudulent endeavours. His charisma is such that it is also possible to see how an innocent yet perfectly intelligent man like Bloom can be corrupted and tempted into a life of crime.

Wilder more than holds his own as Bloom, playing him with enough vulnerability to make him likeable and sympathetic, rather than a one-dimensional shrieking bore, but with a nervous energy and the look of a trapped animal that makes this a hysterical film in both senses of the word. Elsewhere stand-up comedian Dick Shawn almost steals every scene he is in as Lorenzo St Dubois (L.S.D) the perpetually stoned hippy star of the musical, and his scenes have a loose improvised feel, a good contrast to the uptight feel of Bialystock and Bloom.

The rest of the supporting cast of characters are very much a snapshot of the cartoonish comedy caricatures of the era, from groovy flower power hippies, extremely camp gay men, to go-go dancing Swedish blonde secretaries. The Producers also paints a particular picture of New York, a city with a mix of the fancy and funky, a loud vibrant city, full of energy, and full of people of many different shapes, sizes, creeds, colours and persuasions, rich and poor, young and old, many of whom who don't give a damn about other people's sensibilities.

The highlight of the film is the jaw dropping musical set piece that is the opening of Springtime for Hitler. In style, structure and arrangement, the title song is a pitch perfect pastiche of the cheery upbeat Broadway musical, and if nothing else, perfectly illustrates the pitfalls of trying to discuss sensitive, complex subjects with rhyming couplets and chorus lines.

All This and World War II (1976)

All This and World War 2 proves, as a famous man once said, that there is a fine line between clever and stupid. No matter how clever the idea of cutting newsreel and movie footage from the 30s and 40s with the music of the Beatles (not the originals, but covers by stars of the 70s such as The Bee Gees and Leo Sayer) may sound on paper, the end result is very, very stupid.

The main problem is that the choice of songs is rarely either appropriate or very imaginative for the footage, and by limiting herself to Beatles tracks, director Susan Winslow has to shoehorn something in, regardless of relevance. Good taste does not really come into it, which is why in the first two minutes, we see scenes of Hitler visiting his forces, and soldiers marching around doing soldier things, all set to "Magical Mystery Tour" (complete with a Nazi brass band "playing" along). While I am sure there was uncertainty and trepidation around the world as to how the war would turn out, are they seriously comparing the outbreak of war with a "Magical Mystery Tour"?

Even a relatively downbeat pop song such as “Help”, seems crass compared to what we are shown of the individual heroism of soldiers or the wider struggle of the UK's attempts to get the USA involved. Sometimes the juxtapositions are not inappropriate, or silly, but crashingly obvious, with Hitler gazing wistfully from atop his Bavarian mountain retreat, while “The Fool on the Hill” plays in the background, or “Getting Better” while things are, well, getting better for the Allies. Most of the time though the musical choices are just pointless and inexplicable, such as “Polythene Pam” playing behind scenes of people trying on Gas Masks, “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” for scenes of men signing up for the Draft, and, most bafflingly of all, the bombing of Pearl Harbour set to “I am The Walrus”.

The simple fact is that much of this footage does not need any musical accompaniment, being dramatic, chilling or moving enough on its own. It certainly does not need these versions of the songs, none of which improve on the originals, and many of which manage to suck any life and emotion out of the original and replace it with dullness or phoney overwrought schmaltz, which jars terribly against real images of heartbreak and sacrifice.

Rather than just stringing together footage at random, director Susan Winslow does try to create a narrative arc, stretching from Chamberlain and his talk of appeasement, right up to the birth of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, World War 2 is just too complex a thing to boil down into 80 minutes, without skimming over or trivialising many of the aspects of it. A perfect example is the issue of race in the armed forces. We see footage of white troops training, followed shortly by footage of black troops training separately, implying that among the forces fighting a racist ideology there was an element of segregation and racism. However, later we see a montage of Allied troops (an African-American, an Irishman, a Sikh, a Pole, and a Frenchman), proudly announcing where they are from. So are they saying there was no racism? Alternatively, is it more complicated than that? This is a subject worthy of a documentary of its own, but here, it is shown and quickly discarded as the narrative marches remorselessly onwards to the next event, without giving any further explanation or context.

This leads me to wonder what the point of All This and World War II is. It is a documentary but it has no message or point of view, and a distinctive gimmick, but no substance. The skimming over or avoiding of themes and events means, unless anyone is unaware who won the war, it is useless as an educational tool. If the Beatles and World War 2 mix is meant as a joke, it is a five-minute joke stretched over 80. In addition, despite some occasional lapses in good taste, it stops short of being truly offensive, so does not even pass muster as a work of pure provocation.