Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.' Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the 'little man' in modern society. For genius each of them undeniably possesses. The date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr Chaplin) they wear might have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius. it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other. An editorial in The Spectator magazine, marking the men's 50th birthdays, explored the theme in more depth: 'Providence was in an ironical mood when. A comic song about the Führer, recorded by Tommy Handley in 1939, was entitled 'Who Is That Man.? (Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin)'.

He was also fascinated by his uncanny connections to Hitler, who was born in the same week as he was in April 1889. Still, Chaplin was motivated by more than humanitarianism. It really was something that was required.' But Chaplin was very serious about what he wanted to say. 'Some of his contemporaries, like Laurel and Hardy, just wanted to make funny movies and make money. When he started work on the film initially titled 'The Dictator', he was 'a man on a mission', says Louvish. A German propaganda film denounced him as one of 'the foreign Jews who come to Germany' – never mind that he wasn't Jewish – while the US press nicknamed him 'The 20th-Century Moses' because he funded the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees. If you want to see a crystalline reflection of the 21st Century's despots, you'll find it in a film that came out 80 years ago.īy the time Chaplin made The Great Dictator, he had long despised the Nazis, and vice versa. 'It resonated at the time, and it continues to resonate,' says Simon Louvish, the author of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey. What's even more remarkable is that Chaplin didn't just capture Hitler, but every dictator who has followed in his goose steps. More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring it would never be shown in England or America.' Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.

that I would run into censorship trouble. 'I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists,' he wrote in his autobiography. How Britain fought the Nazis with humour

Britain's appeasement policy kept going until March 1939, and the US didn't enter World War Two until December 1941, a year after The Great Dictator was released, so when Chaplin was scripting and shooting the film – his first proper talkie – colleagues at the studio he co-owned were afraid that no government would let it be seen. The more surprising thing, from today's perspective, is that Chaplin was warned that it might not be shown in Britain or the US, either. A film that mocked Adolf Hitler was never going to be the Nazi High Command's first choice of Friday night entertainment. It's hardly surprising that Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator was banned in Germany, and in every country occupied by Germany, in 1940.

Hitler stache name