The Great Dictator 1939 1941 next previous
The Great Dictator Clippings 115/369
Robert Van Gelder, New York Times Magazine, Sept. 8, 1940.
Director as well as star – Chaplin supervising the filming
of „The Great Dictator.“ Photos Museum of Modern Art Film Library, Culver, Times Wide World and United Artists.
1936 – „Modern Times.“ 1940 – „The Great Dictator.“
1922 – „The Pilgrim.“ Abbe.
(...) New York Times Magazine, Sept. 8, 1940
„That lilt, that swing. Beautiful“
Editorial content. „Charlie Chaplin Draws A Keen Weapon
,What is more effective?‘ he says of his new picture,
,than to laugh at these fellows who are kicking humanity
around?‘
By Robert Van Gelder
HOLLYWOOD.
TO the fanfare of a seventy-five-piece orchestra, the
rather dim screen at the south end of a Charles
Chaplin Studio sound stage showed ,Charles Chaplin
Presents. ... The Great Dictator. ... Written and
Produced by Charles Chaplin. ... The Cast. ... Charles
Chaplin, Jack Oakie, Paulette Goddard. ...‘
Charles Chaplin rubbed his stomach enthusiastically
and purred. He swayed to the music. ,That lilt,
that swing. Beautiful. It always gets me.‘ He smiled his bright
smile. When the smile is directed at you it doesn‘t
seem automatic. It seems friendly, slightly, self-deprecatory,
and utterly confidential. When you sit to one side
and watch it bestowed upon some one else the lips look
mechanically creased, and the eyes seem absent,
almost unseeing. The smile is a masterpiece made for one
person at a time.
The Great Dictator was in the final stage of its making;
the music was being dubbed in.“ (...)
„He had come onto the sound stage at 10 o‘clock in the
morning and it was perhaps significant that at that
hour his aides had been decidedly hard to please in respect
to the sound dubbing. In every take the brass was
too loud, or the fiddles came in too late, or the pause before
the bugles was not sufficiently pronounced. ,But
I like it,‘ Chaplin had argued over and over again. ,Aren‘t
you being academic? I liked it. It was stirring.‘
Along about noon all this had changed. His aides were
much better satisfied and Chaplin much less so.
,Not enough emotion. You‘d better do it again,‘ Chaplin
would say. ,There wasn‘t enough wail in the
brasses when those newspaper headlines came up.‘
,About 5 in the afternoon, when the others
are exhausted,‘ whispered one of his employes, ,he‘ll be right
up beside Meredith Willson, the composer and
conductor, swinging a baton.‘“ (...)
Robert Van Gelder in the 1940 Census
27, male, white, American, single
residence
Assembly District 16, Brooklyn, NYC
relationship to head of household
son
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The Great Dictator 1939 1941 next previous
