When Charlie Chaplin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dictator Speech Came About

Char­lie Chap­lin came up in vaude­ville, but it was silent film that made him the most famous man in the world. His mas­tery of that form primed him to feel a degree of skep­ti­cism about sound when it came along: in 1931, he called the silent pic­ture “a uni­ver­sal means of expres­sion,” where­as the talkies, as they were then known, “nec­es­sar­i­ly have a lim­it­ed field.” Nev­er­the­less, he was too astute a read­er of pub­lic tastes to believe he could stay silent for­ev­er, though he only began to speak onscreen on his own terms — lit­er­al­ly, in the case of Mod­ern Times. In that cel­e­brat­ed film, his icon­ic char­ac­ter the Tramp sings a song, but does so in an unin­tel­li­gi­ble hash of cod French and Ital­ian, and yet still some­how gets his mean­ing across, just as he had in all his silent movies before.

That scene appears in the Cin­e­maS­tix video essay above on “the moment the most famous silent come­di­an opens his mouth,” which comes not in Mod­ern Times but The Great Dic­ta­tor, Chap­lin’s 1940 send-up of the then-ascen­dant Adolf Hitler. In it, Chap­lin plays two roles: the nar­row-mus­ta­chioed Hitler par­o­dy Ade­noid Hynkel who “speaks” in a tonal­ly and rhyth­mi­cal­ly con­vinc­ing ersatz Ger­man, and a Tramp-like Jew­ish Bar­ber interned by Hynkel’s regime whose only lines come at the film’s very end.

Dressed as the dic­ta­tor in order to escape the camp, the Bar­ber sud­den­ly finds him­self giv­ing a speech at a vic­to­ry parade. When he speaks, he famous­ly does so in Chap­lin’s nat­ur­al voice, express­ing sen­ti­ments that sound like Chap­lin’s own: inveigh­ing against “machine men with machine minds,” mak­ing a plea for lib­er­ty, broth­er­hood, and good­will toward men.

Though it may have been Chap­lin’s biggest box-office hit, The Great Dic­ta­tor isn’t his most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed pic­ture. When it was made, the Unit­ed States had yet to enter the war, and the full nature of what the Nazis were doing in Europe had­n’t yet come to light. This film’s rela­tion­ship with actu­al his­tor­i­cal events thus feels uneasy, as if Chap­lin him­self was­n’t sure how light or heavy a tone to strike. Even his cli­mac­tic speech was only cre­at­ed as a replace­ment for an intend­ed final dance sequence, though he did work at it, writ­ing and revis­ing over a peri­od of months. It’s more than a lit­tle iron­ic that The Great Dic­ta­tor is main­ly remem­bered for a scene in which a com­ic genius to whom words were noth­ing as against image and move­ment for­goes all the tech­niques that made him a star — and indeed, for­goes com­e­dy itself.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Char­lie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dic­ta­tor: A State­ment Against Greed, Hate, Intol­er­ance & Fas­cism (1940)

Char­lie Chap­lin Finds Com­e­dy Even in the Bru­tal­i­ty of WWI: A Scene from Shoul­der Arms (1918)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

How Char­lie Chap­lin Used Ground­break­ing Visu­al Effects to Shoot the Death-Defy­ing Roller Skate Scene in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.