Criterion Blu-ray Film Review

The Great Dictator (1940) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]

Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel’s regime.

As with so many silent or silent-influenced comedies, many of the best gags in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator are visible a mile off. When a waiter at a grand party held for Adenoid Hynkel (a thinly-disguised Hitler, played by Chaplin) and Benzino Napaloni (Mussolini, played by Jack Oakie) spoons out English mustard into a receptacle next to the whipped cream, you just know that sooner or later one or the other is going to end up with mustard on their strawberries.

But part of Chaplin’s genius lay in playing to the audience’s expectation while simultaneously going beyond it in a surprising way. Thus, it’s not only Hynkel, having accidentally helped himself to mustard instead of cream, who starts writhing around with a mouth on fire, it’s also Napaloni, who intended to put mustard on his sandwich but still didn’t realise how hot it would be. Perhaps the dig here is…