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by mukara 913 days ago
It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Chaplin to make the The Great Dictator. Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things. When Churchill and FDR saw a pre-release private screening of the film, they liked it. (Incidentally, Chamberlain had vowed to ban it in England for fear of angering the actual dictator.) FDR even invited Chaplin to read this very speech on his inauguration in 1941.

Ironically, this is the film that made Americans turn against him. Later that year, he was subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating pro-war propaganda (this was a few months before the US entered the war.)

In the following years, Chaplin was extremely vilified by the Americans mainly for his pro-Soviet and communist views (or rather, for his refusal to be anti-Communist). This led to politically-motivated prosecutions, and culminated in him being exiled from the US when the president Harry Truman(!) canceled his re-entry permit while away on family vacation. (Chaplin was never an American citizen, despite living in the country for over 40 years.)

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...
2 comments
MichaelMoser123 913 days ago
>Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things

Roosevelt did object to Jewish emigration in the nineteen thirties. He also had some rather racist opinions. https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-new-evidence-shows-f...

However Chaplin had different opinions on the matter. He donated part of the profits from his movie to facilitate emigration. https://www.jta.org/archive/charlie-chaplin-reported-giving-...

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gwern 913 days ago
> There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

It's also a good example of how not to defend someone like Charlie Chaplin. I knew next to nothing about Chaplin other than I had greatly enjoyed some of his movies and he was the Little Tramp, but I come out the other end of this attempted defense convinced he was a fellow-traveler Communist and probably not a very good person aside from the communism part; and I wish I had never read that review, because there was no need for me to know any of that.

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