Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Charlie Chaplin Speaks to Libya... and Wisconsin
This speech is from the 1940 movie The Great Dictator, which was written, financed, produced, directed and and starred Charlie Chaplin. This speech takes place after the Jewish Barber assumes Hynkel's (aka Hitler's) identity, is taken to the capitol of Tomainia (aka Germany) to make a victory speech, but instead gives this uplifting call for the people of the world to break free from dictatorships and to use science to make the world a better place.
The ironic part, of course, is that Charlie Chaplin, a neutral nationalist who always spoke out for freedom, was driven out of the United States by right-wing McCarthyites who feared common people excercising their democratic rights. Chaplin left the United States in 1953 to live in Switzerland, and he never came back even to visit. As for the McCarthyites, we elected one of them President of the United States -- his name was Richard Nixon.
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3 comments:
Thanks for sharing, Patrick. So glad you gave up giving up blogging. Re: McCarthyites, what about Ronald Reagan?
Thanks for sharing, Patrick. So glad you gave up giving up blogging. Re: McCarthyism, what about Ronald Reagan?
Yep! While Nixon was actally helping run things at HUAC, Ronald Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild and tossing folks under the bus in the hope of keeping his own, already failed, movie career going. Reagan was PERSONALLY responsible for screwing Charlie Chaplin, as he refused to support ANY of the blacklisted actors, including Chaplin. Other blacklisted actors and artists included composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Will Geer (Grandpa Walton), Burgess Meredith (the trainer in the Rocky movie series),
Zero Mostel (the Producers), Leo Penn (Sean Penn's father), Pete Seeger (America's greates folksinger and folklorist), Michael Wilson (he wrote the screenpalys for Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai), Gypsy Rose Lee (a stripper who also gave us hairless dogs), director and actor Orson Welles, singer and compose Harry Bellafonte, writer Dorothy Parker, playwright Lillian Hellman, screen writers Ring Lardner and Donald Trumbo, and directors Elia Kazan and Richard Attenborough among many, many others.
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