The Tramp and the Dictator

Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler were born in April 1889, a week apart. Both had poor childhoods and both wanted to be artists. This documentary sets the two lives side by side and arrives at the one point where they crossed: The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin played Hitler. Directed together by Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft, the film uses behind-the-scenes footage that came out of Chaplin's house in Switzerland. While Hollywood in the thirties was wary of touching Hitler, Chaplin took it on, and shooting began a week after the invasion of Poland. The documentary does not turn the similarities into a way of equating the two; what it is really about is where two men starting from the same place ended up. Kenneth Branagh narrates.