The theme of mistaken identity is a cinematic staple, with films as varied in tone and intent as The Big Lebowski, Being There, Galaxy Quest and North by Northwest employing the device to thoroughly entertaining effect. Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire, The Great Dictator, is part of that tradition, with an unassuming (and, throughout the movie, unnamed) Jewish barber a dead ringer for Adenoid Hynkel, the deranged, anti-Semitic, Hitlerian ruler of the European nation of Tomainia — with both characters, of course, played by Chaplin himself. But while Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers and so many other filmmakers find something vaguely unsettling — if deeply comedic — in the notion of unsuspecting doppelgangers crossing paths, Chaplin employs the conceit as nothing less than a means of attacking the Third Reich. The Great Dictator is not Chaplin’s greatest or most moving film. But it is, in parts, damn funny and chillingly prescient — sometimes at the very same time. When it comes to relentless, timely political satire, Hollywood has rarely come close to matching it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8bVG8XC-4I]