The Great Ditactor

Charlie Chaplin’s Speech in The Great Dictator: A Call for Decency, a Statement Against Fascism

When we featured this famous scene on OC five years ago, Sheerly Avni wrote: "Charlie Chaplin is said to have added his 4 1/2 minute final speech to The Great Dictator (1940) only after Hitler’s invasion of France. The speech both showcases the actor’s considerable dramatic gifts and makes a prescient, eloquent plea for human decency." According to the biography, Charlie Chaplin and His Times, "the speech was [indeed] recorded in the Chaplin Studio on June 24, 1940, precisely one week after the fall of France," when "only Britain stood between Hitler and total victory in the west." As America resisted getting entangled in a European conflict, Chaplin felt the need to speak out against fascism. He spoke the following lines. They were timely then in Europe. They're timely now in America. And they'll be timely somewhere else in the future, that you can unfortunately guarantee.