Public figures should remember that they need to dress to impress and not dress to distress, writes Charles Wooley
WHEN Charles Chaplin dressed as a Nazi for his 1940 movie The Great Dictator he was lionised (as opposed to being thrown to the lions) in Britain and America.
In Europe, the UK was isolated, alone at war with Hitler.
In the isolationist United States there was no appetite for a repeat of World War I, but in both countries there was massive approval for Chaplin’s dark and satirical comedy about the Nazi dictator and the evils of fascism and antisemitism.
It was a risky venture. Although hilarious on screen at the time, those subjects should in fact have been no laughing matter.
But social mores were decidedly different back when “PC” stood for nothing more than an English copper on a bicycle.
The producers of The Great Dictator were surprised that the film made money, initially $3.5m in America and $5m worldwide.
The New York Times hailed Chaplin’s movie as “a truly superb accomplishment by a truly great artist”. The paper’s film critic was unstinting, suggesting the work was “perhaps the most significant film ever produced”.
Much later another attempt to poke filmic fun at fascist tyranny once more delved deep into the Nazi dress-up box. I remember in 2005 laughing at Mel Brooks’s hilarious big musical number, Springtime For Hitler.
Read the article by Charles Wooley in the Mercury.