The Great Dictator - Plot

Plot

During a battle in the last months of World War I, the protagonist, an unnamed Jewish private and a barber by profession, is fighting for the Central Powers in the army of the fictional nation of Tomainia, comically blundering through the trenches in combat scenes. Upon hearing a fatigued pilot pleading for help, the private attempts to rescue the exhausted officer, Commander Schultz. The two board Schultz's nearby airplane and fly off, escaping enemy fire in the nick of time. Schultz reveals that he is carrying important dispatches that could win the war. However, the plane loses fuel and crashes in a marsh. They both survive, but the private suffers from memory loss. As medics arrive, Commander Schultz gives them the dispatches, but is told that the war has just ended and Tomainia lost.

Twenty years later, as the amnesiac private is released from the hospital, Adenoid Hynkel (also played by Chaplin), the ruthless dictator of Tomainia, has undertaken to persecute Jews throughout the land, aided by Minister of the Interior Garbitsch and Minister of War Herring. The symbol of Hynkel's fascist regime is the "double cross", and Hynkel himself speaks in a macaronic parody of the German language, "translated" at humorously obvious parts in the speech by an overly concise English-speaking news voice-over.

The Jewish private/barber, unaware of Hynkel's rise to power, returns to his barbershop in the Jewish ghetto and is shocked when storm troopers paint "Jew" on the windows of his shop. In his ensuing slapstick scuffle with the stormtroopers, Hannah, a beautiful resident of the ghetto, knocks both Stormtroopers on the head with a frying pan. The barber finds a friend and ultimately a love interest in Hannah. Soon, the barber is attacked again by Stormtroopers, but is saved when Commander Schultz, now a high official in Hynkel's government, intervenes. Schultz recognizes the barber, who is reminded of the war by Schultz and therefore regains his memory. Though surprised to find him a Jew, Schultz orders the storm troopers to leave him and Hannah alone.

Hynkel relaxes his stance on Tomainian Jewry in an attempt to woo a Jewish financier into giving him a loan to support his regime. Egged on by Garbitsch, Hynkel has become obsessed with the idea of being Emperor of the world, dancing at one point with a large, inflatable globe, to the tune of the Prelude to Act I of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.

Against Garbitsch's advice to reinforce the violence against Jews, Hynkel plans to invade the neighboring country of Osterlich, and needs the loan to finance the invasion. When the Jewish financier refuses, Hynkel reinstates and intensifies his persecution of the Jews. When Schultz, who is empathetic to the Jews, voices his objection to the pogrom, Hynkel denounces Schultz as a supporter of democracy and a traitor, and orders him placed in a concentration camp. Schultz flees to the ghetto and begins planning to overthrow the Hynkel regime with Hannah, the barber and other residents there. After discussing and then abandoning a proposed suicide mission, Schultz and the barber are captured and condemned to the camp.

Hynkel is initially opposed by Benzino Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, in his plans to invade Osterlich. Hynkel invites Napaloni to a military show to impress him with a display of military might and psychological warfare, but this ends in disaster. After some friction, a comedic food fight between the two leaders and a deal between the two leaders on which Hynkel immediately reneges, his invasion proceeds. Hannah had emigrated to Osterlich to escape Hynkel, but once again finds herself living under Hynkel's regime.

Schultz and the barber escape from the camp wearing Tomainian uniforms. Border guards mistake the barber for Hynkel, to whom he is nearly identical in appearance. Conversely, Hynkel, on a duck-hunting trip, falls overboard and is mistaken for the barber and is arrested by his own soldiers. The barber, now assuming Hynkel's identity, is taken to the capital of Osterlich to make a victory speech. Garbitsch, in introducing "Hynkel" to the throngs, decries free speech and argues for the subjugation of the Jews. The barber then makes a rousing speech, reversing Hynkel's antisemitic policies and declaring that Tomainia and Osterlich will now be a free nation and a democracy. He calls for humanity in general to break free from dictatorships and use science and progress to make the world better instead.

Hannah, now an impoverished laborer in a vineyard in Osterlich, hears the barber's speech on the radio, and is amazed when "Hynkel" addresses her directly: "Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality. Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow — into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hannah. Look up!" As she rises, an aged man (perhaps her employer) asks, "Hannah, did you hear that?" The girl silences him with a gesture, saying, "Listen," and turns her face, radiant with joy and hope, toward the sunlight.