The Great Dictator (1940)
New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor (Charlie Chaplin)Award nominations: Academy Award for Best Actor (Charlie Chaplin)
Academy Award for Best Original Score (Meredith Willson)
Academy Award for Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Jack Oakie)
Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (Charlie Chaplin)Award details: (details at IMDb)
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The Great Dictator is a 1940 American satirical political comedy-drama film starring, written, produced, scored, and directed by Charlie Chaplin, following the tradition of many of his other films. Having been the only Hollywood filmmaker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first true talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film. At the time of its first release, the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, controversial condemnation of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini's fascism, antisemitism, and the Nazis. Chaplin's film followed only nine months after Hollywood's first parody of Hitler, the short subject You Nazty Spy! by the Three Stooges which itself premiered in January 1940, although Chaplin had been planning it for years before. Hitler had been previously allegorically pilloried in the German film by Fritz Lang, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. In his 1964 autobiography, Chaplin stated that he would not have made the film had he known about the actual horrors of the Nazi concentration camps at the time.