Slapstick Diplomacy: Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Latin American Theatres of War

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I would like to thank Jason Borge, Tamara L. Falicov, Daniel Masterson, Molly Tambor, Virginia Catmur and JLAS anonymous reviewers for their comments, editing and encouragement on this article.

Charlie Chaplin was arguably the most recognisable authoritarian figure – real or fictional, clean shaven or moustachioed – in Latin America during World War II. His polemical new film, The Great Dictator, took the region by storm in early 1941 and magnified his already larger-than-life persona. From Mexico to the Southern Cone, heated congressional debates, newspaper editorials, protests inside and outside theatres and censorship greeted Chaplin's mockery of Adenoid Hynkel (Adolf Hitler) and Benzino Napaloni (Benito Mussolini). The film inspired high jinks and intrigue everywhere it went. Curious Argentines circumvented the Buenos Aires ban by taking the ferry across the Río de la Plata to Uruguay, where fascist protesters interrupted the iconic closing speech.¹ When five masked bandits in search of the film stole the wrong one from a man leaving a Paraguayan train station, others finished the job by kidnapping two theatre employees and ransacking their office.² Peru's ban provoked a duel of honour between a senator and the justice minister. Fortunately, their rhetoric proved sharper than their aim.³ After pro-Axis protesters interrupted a matinee in Chile, a clever headline saluted the actor's legacy: ‘Tear Gas Bombs Attempt to Make Public Cry Instead of Laugh at Charles Chaplin.’⁴

A Chaplin biographer's claim that The Great Dictator was ‘an unparalleled phenomenon, an epic incident in the history of mankind’ captured the enduring hyperbole surrounding this movie event.⁵ Whereas scholarship on Good Neighbour-era films has tended to focus on how Hollywood constructed Latin American identity or represented US values in the service of hemispheric unity,⁶ I instead explore the Chaplin film as a political and cultural object that generated divisiveness and unintended consequences throughout its extraordinary Latin American circulation. Much to the dismay of Latin American leaders, rancorous local debates over whether to authorise the movie trained a harsh light on their own anti-democratic impulses and raised questions about freedom of speech and artistic expression. In the months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the movie unmasked regional cosiness with Axis powers Germany and Italy and subverted US...