© Luca Concas
Music and cinema
Charlie Chaplin
The Great Dictator
(1940)
screenplay Charlie Chaplin
cinematography Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh
editing Willard Nico
set design J. Russell Spencer
music Charlie Chaplin, Meredith Willson
Filarmonica Toscanini
original soundtrack conducted by
Timothy Brock
In the fictional state of Tomainia, the mercurial dictator Adenoid Hynkel hunts down Jews while his spitting image, a quiet barber, resists abuse for the love of the beautiful Hannah– until a chance ‘swap places’ restores hope to humanity… Everyone knows the exhilarating and prophetic masterpiece of Chaplin’s first sound film, The Great Dictator (1940), if only for the iconic scene in which Hynkel/Hitler dances to the overture from Lohengrin with a globe-balloonthat then pops in his face. The film, beautifully restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in 2016, featured a score by Chaplin himself, now restored and arranged by American conductor Timothy Brock, the world’s foremost specialist in conducting and preserving silent film music.
