The Great Dictator - The Jewish Barber and Chaplin's Tramp Character

The Jewish Barber and Chaplin's Tramp Character

There is no consensus on the relationship between the film's Jewish barber and Chaplin's earlier Tramp character, but the trend is to view the barber as a variation on the theme. Famed French film director François Truffaut noted that early in the production, Chaplin said he would not play The Tramp in a sound film, and he considers the barber an entirely different character. However, Turner Classic Movies says that years later, Chaplin acknowledged a connection between the barber and The Tramp. Specifically, "There is some debate as to whether the unnamed Jewish barber is intended as the Tramp's final incarnation. Although his memoirs frequently refer to the barber as the Little Tramp, Chaplin said in 1937 that he would not play the Little Tramp in his sound pictures." In My Life, Chaplin would write, "Of course! As Hitler I could harangue the crowds all I wished. And as the tramp, I could remain silent." In his review of the film, Roger Ebert says that "Chaplin was technically not playing the Tramp", but Ebert also states that, "He put the Little Tramp and $1.5 million of his own money on the line to ridicule Hitler".

Critics who view the barber as different include Stephen Weissman, whose book Chaplin: A Life speaks of Chaplin here "abandoning traditional pantomime technique and his little tramp character." DVD reviewer Mark Bourne bows to Chaplin's earlier statement: "Granted, the barber bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp, even affecting the familiar bowler hat and cane. But Chaplin was clear that the barber is not the Tramp and The Great Dictator is not a Tramp movie." The Scarecrow Movie Guide also views the barber as different.

However, Annette Insdorf, in her book Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, writes that "There was something curiously appropriate about the little tramp impersonating the dictator, for by 1939 Hitler and Chaplin were perhaps the two most famous men in the world. The tyrant and the tramp reverse roles in The Great Dictator, permitting the eternal outsider to address the masses..." Similarly, in The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies, Kathryn Bernheimer writes, "What he chose to say in The Great Dictator, however, was just what one might expect from the Little Tramp. Film scholars have often noted that the Little Tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure, the ostracized outcast, an outsider..."

Several reviewers speak of a morphing of The Little Tramp into the Jewish barber. In Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Thomas Schatz writes of "Chaplin's Little Tramp transposed into a meek Jewish barber", while, in Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929-1939, Colin Shindler writes that "The universal Little Tramp is transmuted into a specifically Jewish barber whose country is about to be absorbed into the totalitarian empire of Adenoid Hynkel." Finally, in A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, J. P. Telotte writes that "The little tramp figure is here reincarnated as the Jewish barber".

A full two-page discussion of the relationship between the barber and The Tramp appears in Eric L. Flom's book Chaplin in the Sound Era: An Analysis of the Seven Talkies in which he concludes:

Perhaps the distinction between the two characters would be more clear if Chaplin hadn't relied on some element of confusion to attract audiences to the picture. With The Great Dictator's twist of mistaken identity, the similarity between the Barber and the Tramp allowed Chaplin break with his old persona in the sense of characterization, but to capitalize on him in a visual sense. The similar nature of the Tramp and Barber characterizations may have been an effort by Chaplin to maintain his popularity with filmgoers, many of whom by 1940 had never seen a silent picture during the silent era. Chaplin may have created a new character from the old, but he nonetheless counted on the Charlie person to bring audiences into the theaters for his first foray into sound, and his boldest political statement to date.