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Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber who accidentally looks very similar to the dictator recklessly joins a beautiful girl and her neighbors in rebelling.
11 January 1886, Oskaloosa, Iowa, USA
5 October 1886, Chicago, Illinois, USA
27 February 1903, London, England, UK
5 March 1894, London, England, UK
28 January 1906, Cumberland, Maryland, USA
17 December 1895, Waldkirch, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
16 April 1889, Walworth, London, England, UK
28 May 1887, New York City, New York, USA
12 September 1894, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
3 January 1890, New York City, New York, USA
26 February 1874, Cheshire, England, UK
2 September 1898, Flushing, New York, USA
9 January 1886, Russia
1 August 1913, France
23 November 1871, Odessa, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire [now Ukraine]
3 June 1910, Whitestone Landing, Long Island, New York, USA
18 February 1867, Halle an der Saale, Province of Saxony, Prussia [now Saxony-Anhalt, Germany]
12 November 1903, Sedalia, Missouri, USA
24 July 1888, Newark, New Jersey, USA
31 March 1896, Brooklyn [now in New York City], New York, USA
April 04, 2017
The lessons remain, and the strength of his statement still inspires his descendants - professional or otherwise - to follow his example.
September 03, 2010
Chaplin is at his most profound in suggesting that there is much of the Tramp in the Dictator, and much of the Dictator in the Tramp.
December 23, 2009
Like all major Chaplin works, Dictator was a cheaply, but methodically, made film, a cardboard act of humanist defiance, and, thanks to its purity of purpose, the cheesier the jokes get, the harder they land.
June 01, 2011
The first full-blown talkie from the biggest star of the silent era, complete with a message that Chaplin couldn't have sent more loudly or clearly.
October 09, 2008
It's when he is playing the dictator that the comedian's voice raises the value of the comedy content of the picture to great heights.
May 30, 2011
While it is not the greatest of Charlie Chaplin's feature films, it is certainly his bravest, if not one of the bravest films ever made.
May 20, 2011
...stared evil in the face long before the rest of Hollywood even thought it was possible.
May 20, 2012
...a great movie because it works as a film, and because it is a document of courage and faith, the prime exhibit in Chaplin's humanist brief ... Dictator is a comedy, the work of a clown, but it is no joke. Chaplin had lethal intent.
January 18, 2013
The only trouble is that such perfect scenes as this are followed by more conventional passages which would be funny enough in an average picture but let one down in a film that deals so ambitiously with so great a theme.
July 22, 2010
Despite the film's weaknesses, Chaplin's lampooning of Hitler is a moment of comic genius, complemented by Jack Oakie's ridiculously exaggerated portrayal of the Mussolini-like Italian fascist
September 03, 2010
Through no fault of Chaplin's, during the two years he was at work on the picture dictators became too sinister for comedy.
February 09, 2006
The representation of Hitler is vaudeville goonery all the way, but minus the acid wit and inventive energy that Groucho Marx managed.
