4 ms·
That's probably the best kind of "preachy". And back then, it really was required as anti-semitism was definitely at its peak then.
by anshumankmr 4y ago
That's probably the best kind of "preachy". And back then, it really was required as anti-semitism was definitely at its peak then.
- yamtaddle 4y agoNineteen-fucking-forty release year. About a year earlier (mind, production leads release by quite a bit) we had, infamously, turned away almost a thousand Jews on the St Louis seeking asylum—of whom, about a quarter would ultimately die in the holocaust, after re-settling in countries that Nazi Germany eventually conquered. It's hard not to see the relevance of Communism to the speech, too, that being the one of a couple things that loomed (much) larger in the average German mind than the "Jewish question", in the rise of Nazism. No accident that Chaplin would find himself on the wrong side of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), I guess. It's maybe the great pre-war (from the American perspective, of course—'39 was the start for Europe, and earlier still for China and other places like Ethiopia) WWII movie.