The Great Dictator (May 14th and 15th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE GREAT DICTATOR screens Saturday May 14th at 7:15 p.m. and Sunday May 15th at 3:45 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

Viewers are used to short-lived satire like EPIC MOVIE or DISASTER MOVIE, which will look terribly out of date just months later. Not exactly great art. But THE GREAT DICTATOR is different. This is satire as art, with indeed silent-era icon Charlie Chaplin - in his first film with extensive dialogue - on a mission to raise an outcry over the screwed-up world of the 1930s (seemingly more screwed-up than today, if that's possible), attacking the international villains of the era, the Third Reich. Between WWI and WWII, a title tells us up front, insanity reigns and humanity "got kicked about a bit" in a suspiciously German-looking country called Tomania. 

Modern Times (May 6 at 7:30 p.m. and May 7 at 5:15 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

The finest, freshest comedy you can find is, no, not the HANGOVER sequel, sorry, but this vintage-1936 pantomime tour-de-force starring Charlie Chaplin. As with his previous CITY LIGHTS, Chaplin decided not to jump head-first into the sound-film era like so many of his compatriots did. But rather he made - perhaps symbolically, intentionally or not - the last great silent-film feature. There is brief dialogue, and Chaplin's first spoken words on film (which turn out to be nonsense lyrics improvised in a pseudo-European song), but most of this is sheer slapstick-silent virtuosity. Chaplin, billed simply as "a Worker," is a frazzled assembly-line drone who, in the opening moments, suffers a hilarious nervous breakdown on the job (this being the 1930s, it's comedy; today Charlie would just grab a gun and kill everyone). Fired, the Worker goes looking for employment in an absurdist, Depression-era world of shantytowns, waifs, night clubs full of rich folks, strikers, exploitation, discontent and huge machinery. No, wait, that was me in Cleveland, the other day. No, wait, that is Chaplin. Hard to tell, since we're both named Charles, among other regional similarities.