[The Great Dictator], which is neither more or less episodic and shapeless than Modern Times, is at times unwontedly serious in its direction, weighted down, as it were, by its suspended advance towards Chaplin's final apologia. At such moments his failure fully to master the sound medium becomes painfully noticeable. The scenes are long; the composition stilted; the dialogue banal. Their object—for the most part—is to emphasise the misery of the Jews under the Nazi régime; but they are too dully sentimental to do more than bore.

It is only with Chaplin himself that we can feel and understand the cruelties and stupidities. As the little Ghetto barber, plunged after many years of amnesia into a vile world of stormtroopers and spies, his audacious application of pails of whitewash to the thugs says all, for the time being, that we need. The barber, indeed, is...