September 9 at 7pm

Introducing Night School, MSP Film’s new monthly repertory series exploring film history and form. Local experts heighten our appreciation of cinema as an art form, social institution, and object of study. Class is in session the second Wednesday of every month – enroll today!

The Night School screening of The Great Dictator will feature a discussion of reception studies with Megan Feeney, PhD, author of Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959.

ABOUT THE FILM

In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomainian” dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supporting turns, The Great Dictator, boldly going after the fascist leader before the U.S.’s official entry into World War II, is an audacious amalgam of politics and slapstick that culminates in Chaplin’s famously impassioned speech.