DVD of the Week: The Great Dictator

For this, the one-hundredth edition of our DVD of the Week, its producer, Monica Racic, and I wanted to do something special, and there’s no film more special than Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” from 1940, which I discuss in this clip, taken from the marvellous new restoration of it that’s forthcoming from Criterion. Chaplin is the transcendent figure in the history of cinema—he put the cinema into history with his comedy, and here—in his devastating comic mockery of Adolf Hitler and denunciation of the tyrant’s hateful and world-dominating madness—he turns his comedy into an act of vast historical moment. Throughout the week, I’ll be revisiting this profound and daring film, which restores the therapeutically furious essence of comedy: to tear away familiar and comforting illusions in order to reveal the full measure of the world’s grievous absurdity.