"I deliver perfection..." "and don't brag about it!" ":" "D" "Aut Caesar aut nullus." "Emperor of the World..." "Charlie Chaplin was a divinity." "He owned the world." "We was the first universal artist that I can think of." "Chaplin was possibly the most popular person, entertainer, however you want to say it, on the planet." "The thing about Chaplin that made me lean towards him was the ambience he gave, the sort of free-floating feeling of someone who can circumvent nature." "My reaction to "The Great Dictator" is so hard to talk about because" "I laughed so hard and was so deeply moved." "Here was this huge artist standing up against this gargantuan monster." "It was a championship match for the ages." "To me it was one of the finest films I had ever seen." "When you are faced by the totalitarian regimes and the madness they inflicted on the world, courage isn't enough." "You've got to laugh in their face." "Throw back your head and say," ""You don't count."" ""I discount you this way." "I give you the laugh of all time, the great laugh of acceptance, which melts you down."" "A remarkable new discovery in the Chaplin villa at Vevey, Switzerland." "In the film vault are the famous comedies," "The Gold Rush, City Lights, which are known to the entire world." "What was not known lay in the cellar for decades:" "Two suitcases belonging to Sydney Chaplin," "Charlie's brother, full of curious little boxes, which turned out to contain amateur film." "Chaplin shot his film in black and white but this footage takes us behind the scenes in colour." "It adds a dimension to an extraordinary story:" "The confrontation between Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin through the making of a controversial film released in 1940, called "The Great Dictator"." "Chaplin, the little tramp, and Hitler, leader of Germany, had more in common than a moustache." "They were born in the same week of the same month of the same year." "Before Chaplin became famous as The Tramp," "Hitler was a tramp." "Both were outsiders who left their homeland to conquer the world." "They became the best loved and most hated men of their time." "In every country Chaplin was the symbol for laughter," "Hitler, the symbol for destruction." "His war cost 55 million lives." "But in the 1930s he seemed unstoppable." "World leaders sought to appease him." "Most of Hollywood chose to ignore him." "But one voice would speak to millions." "One man would dare challenge the world's most dangerous leader." "Charlie Chaplin." "The climax of "The Great Dictator"." "The Jewish barber, mistaken for the dictator, is called upon to speak." "Present arms!" "Your Excellency." "The world awaits your word." "Chaplin had never spoken on the screen until he made this film." "He felt if he could talk from the heart he might even be able to shorten the war." "What would bring Chaplin and Hitler into such a unique confrontation?" "Chaplin was born in 1889 in the South London slums he would recreate so often in his films." "His father was a music hall singer, as was his mother." "Because of her mental trouble," "Charlie and his brother were sent to the workhouse." "Working people were terrified of this fate, which Chaplin conveyed in "The Kid", when the law takes the child to the workhouse." "Chaplin escaped into theatre, became a music hall comedian and sailed on his first tour to America in 1910." "Hitler was lower middle class, from the border of Austria and Germany." "He hated school and learned little but was always a ringleader." "His father was a brutal man, a customs officer who had married one of his servants." "Hitler's mother was probably the only woman Hitler ever loved." "She protected him from his father." "As soon as he could he went to Vienna, where he hoped to become an artist." "The young Hitler refused to do any work other than drawing, but was considered no better than competent." "His failure in the exam for the Vienna Academy devastated him." "How different history might have been had Hitler been accepted." "He lost his self-respect and sank lower and lower into the slums of old Vienna." "He became a tramp, sleeping rough." "This Vienna men's home probably saved his life." "It was supported partly by Jewish charities." "But from such men as Guido von List" "Hitler soaked in hatred of the Jews." "List preached the superiority of the Aryan." "His symbol would become Hitler's." "Munich, 1st August 1914." "A cheering crowd celebrates the outbreak of war." "The scene is recorded by a photographer and among the crowd is the 25-year-old Adolf Hitler." "It is not often one sees the birth of a legend." "This crowd takes no notice of the tramp on his first appearance in public in 1914." "A year later he would be mobbed wherever he went." "Two years later he would be the most famous man in the world." "February 1916." "Chaplin signs with the Mutual Film Corporation for the highest salary of any performer in history." "Standing behind, Sydney Chaplin." "Hitler was earning nine marks a week at the front." "But he loved the war, it gave him a sense of purpose." "And he was still an artist." "He designed this facade for a soldiers' cinema." "Hitler had avoided the Austrian army because of his passion for Germany." "His supreme commander, the Kaiser, is jealous of Chaplin's popularity in this wartime cartoon." "Charlie captured the Kaiser at the end of "Shoulder Arms"." "Chaplin films did more than any others to raise morale." "20 years later" "Chaplin would restage World War One for "The Great Dictator", picking up where "Shoulder Arms" left off, wearing German uniform." "Big Bertha, able to fire 100 miles, made its appearance on the Western Front, striking terror into the enemy." "75 miles away was her target:" "The cathedral of Notre-Dame." "Stand clear!" "Ready!" "Fire!" "He was the little guy who..." "They loaded it up then he had to pull this string that fired it." "He had such a funny way of doing it that I screamed with laughter." "It ruined the take." "He was delighted." "I thought he'd be furious." ""That cost me a fortune!"" "He loved it." "He became a worldwide figure during the First World War." "While the German submarines were sinking convoys of ships, somehow his films were circulating around the world." "It's as if there were special convoys just to take Chaplin films to Europe." "Before stupendous crowds all over the United States," "Chaplin took part in Liberty Bond rallies." "Many criticised him for not joining up but these rallies brought in huge sums for the war effort." "He appeared with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, with whom he'd form United Artists." "Here, with D.W. Griffith, they announce their independence." "This gave Chaplin complete artistic freedom." "By now the war was over." "A gas attack at the end of 1918 had put Hitler into hospital." "While convalescing he had heard of the defeat of the German army." "He felt utterly betrayed." "He had no job to go to." "So, like so many, he stayed in the army." "The revolutions of 1919 and 1920 propelled Hitler into the Nazi party." "1921." "Chaplin returns to London for the first time." "The city he knew as a poverty-stricken youth gave him a phenomenal welcome." "But for Hitler conditions were appalling." "An economic collapse, when a loaf of bread cost a billion marks, created ideal conditions for extremists." "Hitler joined his old commander, General Ludendorff, in an attempt to seize power:" "The Munich putsch of 1923." "It landed him in gaol where he put his political ideas into a book." "Among the men who inspired him was the Italian fascist dictator," "Benito Mussolini." "Fascism in the twenties was regarded with admiration." "Mussolini seemed to be cleaning up the marshes, suppressing the Mafia, getting the trains to run on time..." "Mussolini particularly impressed businessmen." "The Wall Street crash of 1929 undermined the world's markets." "Without it, Hitler could never have reached power." "It brought chaos to Germany and convinced many that democracy did not work." "Germany was falling into anarchy." "Political street fights happened daily." "The Communists fought the Nazis, everyone fought the police." "People looked for a strong leader." "Hitler knew the value of film but audiences did not respond to him as a silent actor." "Germany will remain free, like its people and fatherland." "I remember seeing a silent newsreel of Hitler, and thinking suddenly," ""This man looks absolutely ridiculous and just like Chaplin would look if he were playing such a part."" "Hitler's fortunes were transformed by sound, launched in America two years earlier by a film made, ironically, by Jews about Jews." "Sound increased his audiences and made them take him seriously." "I do not think that our opponents who were laughing then are still laughing today." "He clearly gained power as an orator." "That happened bit by bit and his enthusiasm grew." "He perfected his talent and he even took acting lessons to intensify his impact." "Chaplin depended even more on gesture." "He kept making silent pictures until he made "The Great Dictator", when he played Adenoid Hynkel." "Soldiers for Hynkel!" "He was a marvellous imitator." "He could do almost any language just by the sound of it." "They had a newsreel theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, only newsreels, which my father adored." "Instead of seeing some movie that was lousy, we'd go and see an hour and a half of newsreels." "You'd see most of this." "Chaplin considered Hitler one of the greatest actors he'd ever seen." "If we ourselves raise the German people by means of our work, our endeavour, our determination, our defiance and our persistence, then we will be raised like our forefathers, who were not given a gift of Germany." "They had to create it for themselves." "A reference to the Jewish people." "Chaplin also played a Jewish barber, whose girlfriend in the film, and real-life wife, was the half-Jewish Paulette Goddard." "How did you do it?" "The Nazis were convinced Chaplin was a Jew." "Chaplin never denied it." "No." "I thought Chaplin was Jewish." "First of all, the way I was brought up, everybody funny was Jewish." "On his visit to Berlin in 1931, he was met by rapturous crowds." "The Nazis hated a man they thought was a Jew getting such a welcome." "We knew that he was a Jew, and of course that was not what we wanted." "We knew that he would not love us and indeed he did not." "We also knew he was influential." "The Nazis would later use these newsreels in their most notorious propaganda film." "The Jew Chaplin was enthusiastically welcomed on his first visit to Berlin." "One part of the German people unsuspectingly applauded the foreign Jews who had come to Germany, the deadly foes of their race." "The Nazis brought out a book called The Jews Are Looking at You, in which Chaplin was described as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat"." "A friend of Chaplin came across a copy in Berlin." "And I thought he ought to have a look at this and I sent him a copy." "Now in all the years," "Charlie often sent me Christmas cards, telegrams, telephone calls, but he only sent me one letter." "And it was a short letter thanking me for that book, and I always think that it may well have contributed to his resolve to make "The Great Dictator"." "Mussolini also disapproved of Chaplin and would ban his films." "Chaplin visited Venice, expecting to meet the dictator." "The meeting never happened." "But he would be brilliantly parodied in "The Great Dictator"." "He's coming." "Quick, give me a flower." "At all times be above him, before him." "Entering or leaving you must be first." "Hello, Hynky!" "One of the great moments in "The Great Dictator"" "is the casting of Jack Oakie as Mussolini." "I thought the public enthusiastic." "Sure." "They like to see new faces." "Oakie comes out on the balcony, struts and sticks out his chin." "And, by God, there's Mussolini!" "So it was a masterful job of casting on the part of Chaplin." "You cannot treat Bacteria this way." "I'll take the Bacterian people and tear them apart, like this!" "Look what he's doing!" "It's an insult to my people!" "He's-a tearing spaghetti!" "He sign-a the treaty or we have a war!" "Before satirising the dictators," "Chaplin turned his attention to America's problems in the 1930s:" "Strikes, lockouts, unemployment." "The Ford factories brought out troops to deal with strikers." "Henry Ford supported Hitler and was both anti-Semitic and anti-union." "When Chaplin made his first overtly political film, the Big Boss bore a strong resemblance to Henry Ford." "Quit stalling!" "Get back to work!" "Go on!" "Henry Ford had invented the assembly line, the trigger for Chaplin's satire." "Attention, foreman!" "Bench five." "Check nut tightening." "Nut coming loose on bench five." ""Modern Times" was one of the greatest movies I'd seen." "As a matter of fact, maybe I still think that." "The whole idea of attacking capitalism, not only from an economic and social, but from a human point of view." "What he was talking about was becoming part of the machinery, because we're so dependent on it." "In the movie a red flag falls off a lorry and the parade comes in behind him and the cops beat the hell out of him." "Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant ideas!" "And, God, the execution!" "There was a revolutionary feeling growing in America." "People who'd been respectably middle class were actually breaking into bakeries and stealing bread." "It was extreme." "Industrial relations were also violent." "While, in Germany, life was being transformed." "Once Hitler had come to power, people accepted the supremacy of the state over the individual." "Women had a secondary role, while men were trained for war." "Hitler tackled unemployment with huge construction projects, like these pioneer motorways." "There was an admiration for Hitler because we hadn't seen his evil things yet." "They hadn't begun to manifest." "We saw that he helped cure their inflation and put people to work." "He had the men marching round with shovels over their shoulders instead of rifles." "I don't think that anyone really wanted a dictator in our country but when we looked at Hitler we thought," ""Maybe something like this could get us out of our depression."" "These Nuremberg rallies, Hitler said, were for peace and freedom." "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." "Never seen anything as wonderful." "And I screamed with the best of them." ""Heil!" Or whatever." "And I, you know..." "I don't feel guilty about that." "How can I?" "I was eleven." "What I found extraordinary was the theatre." "In the mid-thirties, political leaders all over the world expressed their admiration for the achievements of Adolf Hitler." "The anti-Jewish boycott would become a feature of Chaplin's film." "The barber has lost his memory and knows nothing of the dictator." "The word "Jew" was hardly ever mentioned in American films." "Leave that alone." " Don't be silly." " I'm not silly!" "I appreciate that." "When you talk to me, "Hail Hynkel"!" "Who are you?" "I'll show you who I am!" "The emigration began." "Many Jews set out for the land of opportunity." "Our unemployment was transferred here from foreign lands." "If we'd refused admission to the 16,500,000 in our midst, there would be no serious unemployment problem to harass us." "The German-American Bund held mass rallies before audiences of 20,000." "They followed the Nazi party line." "Anti-Semitism was so rife there was a chance of fascism succeeding in the United States." "Over 100 organisations put out anti-Semitic literature like this." "No wonder the subject became hard to discuss." "I know among other Jews, some of them thought that it was making waves." "Shouldn't talk about those things!" "Because there was certainly a feeling among what you might call the Jewish establishment that such things you didn't mention." "They'd just bring trouble." "There were congressional investigations into the Jewish influence on motion pictures." "It's incredible what went on in this country!" "The producers, if you check the films that were made until late in the 30s, they were very worried of rocking the boat because they were still making money in Germany, they were making money in Italy," "and the bottom line was profit and really not principle." "Hitler in particular saw every American film he could." "He was a film enthusiast." "That was the best thing and his favourite pastime." "The Bengal Lancers he very much liked, and of course films with Greta Garbo." "He'd have liked to have received her in Berlin." "Propaganda minister Goebbels would have preferred German films for the German public, but they loved American films as much as Hitler." "Goebbels ensured a supply." "Hitler would see" "The Hound of the Baskervilles and even record his opinion." "The ones he disliked were often banned." "Louis B. Meyer of MGM would actually run those films with the Nazi German consul, and was willing to take out things that the Nazi objected to." "The problem with Hollywood, which I've often said to my friends, is that it's a company of cowards." "They won't stand up for anything." "They pretend to stand up but when the money is down they fade out." "Walter Wanger made "Blockade", which was self-evidently about the Spanish Civil War, but never mentioned Spain or Franco or the Civil War because it was felt that this would complicate acceptability in many countries." "Henry Fonda played the lead in "Blockade"." "I remember the last sentence of the picture." "He turned directly to camera and, looking out at us with those great Fonda eyes, he said, "Where is the conscience of the world?"" "The Anschluss." "Germany unites with Austria, 1938." "Hitler last saw Vienna as a poverty-stricken youth." "As Leader and Chancellor of Germany," "I welcome my homeland into the German Reich." "It was three days after the Anschluss and I was walking in the street with my best friend and came upon this group, a number of middle-aged ladies and gentlemen, all obviously upper-class citizens." "They were on their knees cleaning the pavement with toothbrushes." "They were lots of Viennese in this group, laughing and taunting them." "It was something that could have been out of "The Great Dictator"" "because one almost laughed it was so terrible." "Against a background of aggression and appeasement," "Chaplin announced his film in October 1938." "The British, anxious not to upset Hitler, said they would ban it." "To general astonishment, Chaplin went ahead." "Every one of my friends, many of whom were Jewish, like myself, felt that a David had arisen, a comic David, to fight Goliath." "And we could only be happy." "Kristallnacht, November 9th 1938." "The Nazis unleashed a wave of violence against the Jews." "If the Jewish people who are working in financial affairs in Europe and elsewhere should manage to throw the nations into another world war then the result will not be the Bolshevising of the world or a Jewish victory, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." "There was a big movement afoot among Jewish producers in Hollywood to discourage Chaplin's film." "They went to him and said," ""Charlie, you're going to make it terrible for our people over there."" ""It's going to make Hitler furious."" "And Charlie would say," ""I don't care if he's furious." "He can't be any worse than he is."" "He even felt there would be trouble getting a release." "They were saying, "This is a disaster, Charlie, not just for the Jews but for American foreign policy."" "Charlie was beginning to get a little scared." "Roosevelt got word of this and he sent Harry Hopkins out to talk to Charlie." "Hopkins said, "Look, Charlie, the President is all for this."" "And, "You don't have to worry about their boycotting the release."" ""He'll see that it's released."" ""He feels this is very important and you must go ahead and not listen to any of these people trying to discourage you."" "In April 1939" "Hitler celebrated his 50th birthday with one of the largest military parades in history." "For the first time since 1919, tanks rolled through Berlin." "Chaplin celebrated his birthday by working on his script." "He said he wanted a Berlin premiere for the Führer's benefit." "Chaplin saw the Russians as the only hope to defeat Nazism." "But, to his horror, in August the unthinkable happened:" "The Nazis signed a pact with the Soviets." "I believe the great phrase was:" ""Russia won't pull England's and France's coals out of the fire."" "That was the rationalisation for the pact." "So the particular atmosphere I ran into was of tragedy or calamity." "The end of the world." "The victory parade in Warsaw." "Germany and Russia have carved up Poland." "England and France have declared war on Hitler." "As Chaplin began work, his brother Sydney filmed him." "Sound equipment was installed and a ghetto set built at his Hollywood studio." "The finance came not from the other Hollywood studios but entirely from Chaplin himself." "Filming in the ghetto began on September 9th 1939, six days after the outbreak of war, in conditions of strict secrecy." "Unknown to Chaplin, events for Jews were worse than even he portrayed them." "Nonetheless he took great risks with his film." "A very daring thing to have done." "To satirise the Jews and Hitler and Mussolini, and make a sad comedy, it's almost tragic." "You're laughing at something you don't want to laugh at." "First you'll finish this." "Here." "Go on, paint that!" "Even though it was a comedy," "Chaplin forced his audience to face Nazi brutality." "Chaplin was proud of the equipment he was using for the first time." "He called Lewis Milestone and said, "You've got to come down here."" ""There's something I have to show you, something important."" "So Milestone came." "My father said, "Look at this!"" "Milestone saw." "He had a crane, lifted the camera, moved it over..." "He said, "What do you think?"" "Milestone said, "They've been doing that for years!"" "In his own studio, Chaplin was also a dictator, but usually a benevolent one." "He always could divorce the "Little Man", as he called himself, from his everyday living, because he was so entirely different in person than anything that he did on screen." "But with "The Great Dictator"" "he became more and more important to himself." "I used to laugh so because the moment he put on uniform, he'd smooth down his flat tummy and preen a bit, always looking in the mirror just to see that everything was just so, which was..." "He was not a vain man but he certainly was during the making." "His Excellency is about to descend the stairs." "Your Excellency." "Are you hurt?" "That was what was so interesting." "Everybody that was in the film in a uniform, that was important, with Charlie, they lived their parts." "They thought it was simply wonderful." "To take Osterlich!" "I can't believe it." "You can't believe it!" "You let him steal a march on us." "If he didn't like something, he'd do it again and again." "Then come back a week later and do it again." "It was his money!" "And he was a perfectionist." "Very few people get to do that." "He felt very pompous, very grand." "And the whole time he was doing it he was just a different person." "I'm surrounded by incompetent, stupid, sterile stenographers." " I'll get you a pen." " Don't bother." "I won't send it." "Get out, get out!" "Neither Chaplin's imagination nor the resources of Hollywood could duplicate Speer's grandiose design for the Reichchancellery." "But in photos of Hitler's study Chaplin noticed something which he seized upon." "Others claimed it was their idea but its origins can be found in a 1928 home movie." "Chaplin was fooling for visitors, as he often did, when he came up with this idea involving the globe and a German helmet." "It summed up perfectly the Führer's godlike ambition." "But, said Picturegoer, "by the time Chaplin finishes his film, we may all have forgotten who Hitler was."" "It's the storm troopers!" " Get on the roof." " No." " They'll kill you!" " I'll fight." "Don't be a fool, you'll be murdered." "Get on the roof." "Come on, come on!" "Bravely, Chaplin turns his camera away from the obvious and shows us this symbolic shot." "Smash in the door!" "Come on!" "Where are the bombs?" "Let her go!" "There goes the barbershop." "Never mind." "We can start again." "We can go to Osterlich." "That's still free." "Main filming just finished when Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg." "France fell in a month," "Denmark in hours." "Chaplin was so appalled he considered withholding the film." "This shows Hitler the moment he heard of the fall of France." "Chaplin said, "He is a horrible menace to civilisation, rather than someone to laugh at."" "I felt that this was a terrible thing, to make a comic film about him." "There are two things which are very dangerous:" "To associate humour with people like that, and to diminish them." "Comedy is the greatest way to attack anything like a totalitarian regime." "They can't stand it." "And that gives the people a chance to laugh, too." "You can't go on being grim forever." "Some people survived Buchenwald because of their sense of humour." "Courage doesn't do it." "Laughs do." "This was to have been in Chaplin's original ending, which he'd begun work on months before:" "Soldiers discarding their weapons and uniting in a folk dance." "The sequence involved hundreds of actors and technicians." "Here Chaplin tries out the opening:" "His own arrival." "He rehearses obsessively the same gesture over and over, trying to perfect it, while all the time the camera turns." "He repeats it with stand-ins so he can observe it from the camera." "But he knows it's not working." "He vents his frustration on an assistant director but he knows something more fundamental is wrong." "In this form he would abandon the sequence." "He realised his ending would have to focus more on his own speech, which he would deliver not as the dictator, not as the barber, but as himself," "Charlie Chaplin." "Hitler's attack on France gave him the impetus to rewrite the speech, which would be a plea for peace, a plea for sanity." "He was 458 days into the picture before he was ready to shoot it." "At dawn on the day Chaplin was delivering his plea for freedom," "Hitler swept into Paris to view his conquest." "A carpet of flowers greeted the Führer in Berlin." "He was at his zenith, having achieved his victories with incredible speed." "Said Chaplin's son:" ""If only Charlie could move as fast as Adolf Hitler!"" "But Chaplin was still not happy, and was re-shooting yet again." "The ghetto set had been torn down so he rebuilt it." "He spent months re-shooting, re-editing and re-recording before, finally, after 559 days of work, the report sheet showed no rushes, no shooting, no recording..." "He was ready to show his picture to the world." "The film opened in two Broadway theatres simultaneously, attended by a crowd so full of celebrities it was commemorated in a special cartoon." "He was going to show up." "Lots of publicity." "And the crowds were tremendous." "It received an absolute ovation." "People stood, cheered..." "called for Chaplin." "Here this man had come out against Hitler." "It was as if the greatest angel in the calendar of saints and angels had suddenly taken a stand." "It was such a brilliant tour de force that I think it blinded people as to what it was saying or not saying." "When you think of a movie that begins with Big Bertha defecating and ending up with that speech to camera, and the first time he'd spoken..." "When you think of the span emotionally that movie covers..." "It's a miracle." "You must speak." "I can't." "You must." "It's our only hope." "That ending doesn't come as an abrupt thing." "He builds it so carefully, prepares you so carefully, for your own feelings to be involved on another level." "I'm not saying laughter isn't a feeling, it's tremendous." "But to get rid of the laughter feeling and slowly let this other emotion well up." "I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor." "That's not my business." "I don't want to rule or conquer anyone." "I should like to help everyone:" "Jew, gentile, black man, white." "We all want to help one another." "Human beings are like that." "We want to live by each other's happiness, not misery." "We don't want to hate one another." "In this world, the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone." "I wept at the ending." "It was something to me that had to be said." "If it was inartistic, it was inartistic." "I don't care." "Nothing has to be perfect." "It seemed mawkish, maudlin, at the time." "But in the context of the nuclear age" "I think it has great resonance, great power." "The way of life can be free and beautiful but we have lost the way." "Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into bloodshed." "We have developed speed but have shut ourselves in." "Machinery has left us in want." "Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness, hard and unkind." "We think too much and feel too little." "More than machinery we need humanity." "At the end of this speech, he dares to remind you that you don't have to go on killing, you don't have to be a totalitarian." "You can make do with the worst people in the world." "Somehow you must." "And that's what he did." "And a lot of people with violence in their soul resented the fact that someone wanted peace." "Chaplin said he wouldn't have made the film had he known the full horror of Hitler's crimes." "Millions were grateful that he did." "Chaplin brings us to tears because he reminds us of the potential of mankind." "Lighting a lantern and keeping it aside while mankind goes on destroying itself, and being there when the war is over to relight the lantern and to give us hopes for tomorrow." "During the Blitz on London, the film opened to an ecstatic reaction." ""The best propaganda film since the start of the war", said one." ""The best heartener we could have."" "The film was to go on to become Chaplin's biggest moneymaker." "Yet it was banned across Europe, in parts of South America, and even Ireland." "But did Hitler see it?" "At the end of the war I was in Berlin." "I was in charge of gathering photographic evidence for the war-crime trial being prepared in Nuremberg." "But in the course of it I looked up the file of the films" "Hitler had ordered to run." "And this is the truth." "True." "He ordered "The Great Dictator", and then he ordered it a day or so after again." "It was obvious to me that Hitler had it shown to him, and would have laughed at it." "You know, Hitler wasn't dull." "I can imagine Hitler laughing heartily at the scene where he and Mussolini are sitting at the barber's and their seats go up in the air." "Hitler wasn't a killjoy and, within the inner circle, he could definitely laugh at jokes like these." "The German public did not see the film but the German army did." "Once." "In occupied Belgrade, a 17-year-old working in film dispatch," "Nikola Radosevic, discovered a print." "We had planned a cultural sabotage." "I belonged to the Blue Ribbon, but we never used any weapons against German soldiers." "No, we only used fun." "We wanted Hitler to hear what Chaplin thought of him." "Nikola substituted the Chaplin film for a German feature." "At the start of the show, people didn't immediately realise what was going on." "But after 40 minutes an SS man pulled out his gun and opened fire at the screen." "All the others rushed out of the hall." "They didn't want to stay any longer because something was happening against Hitler." "1945." "The last shots of Hitler before his suicide." "Hitler's world lay in ruins." "When the Reichchancellery was captured by the Russians, they found nothing but rubble." "But one object remained intact." "With "The Great Dictator"," "Chaplin had strengthened millions through the power of laughter at a time when madness and darkness covered the world." "Despite his plea for sanity, the political climate of the McCarthy era forced him into exile." "In 1952 he was locked out of the United States." "But one country would welcome him back." "Now the train draws into Waterloo, not far from Chaplin's birthplace." "What a reception from the thousands who have gathered to welcome him!" "Charlie was worried in case our affection for him had dimmed." "London has shown him that he need not have worried." "We can never forget the laughter he brought." "Throughout the world he is loved." "Chaplin was not born great." "Yet in a lifetime of laughter and tears he has achieved an everlasting greatness." "Subtitles by Howard Bonsor" "Subtitling by TVS" " TITRA FILM"