Nit: Charlie Chaplin was born in 1889, not 1899. Hitler as well, so the point remains.
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Yeah, uh, for God’s sakes, whatever you do, don’t oppose fascism it too soon, like in 1937 or anything.
Then, you become branded as “premature anti-fascists”! Don’t be premature, people!
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It shouldn’t be, after 74 million Americans voted for Trump to be president again. Dismissing it as mental illness doesn’t help anyone, and causes harm to genuinely mentally ill people who are far more likely to be the victims of fascism than the supporters.
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The timing of this bit of history is important! The script was written and most of the movie shot before Hitler invaded Poland.
For us it is easy to criticize appeasement and to understand the dangers of Hitler but that is all with hindsight. Chaplin, that funny little English tramp, saw things more clearly than many at that times. Artists and writers often do.
While he was being criticized for exaggeration and throwing oil on the fire the events in Europe quickly overtook this. In hindsight Hitler and Mussolini were not even that much exaggerated. Funny little visionary 
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That screenplay reads as if it was written with hindsight, maybe in '39 or '41 or so. That it was written in '33 is impressive. It’s also chilling and had it been made would probably be deemed a classic today.
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On the movie Chaplin there was a scene where people says Chaplin that if the gone with The Great Dictator, he would kill Charlie. He said it would be better for him to die on a cause.
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I was watching a lecture the other day and the speaker was saying that these days, the Nazis are the source for morality in exactly the opposite way that Jesus once was. Instead of a universally recognized (in the Western World) positive example, we have a universally recognized example of evil.
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Chaplin and Keating had their place in cinema history because of the way they used the medium to express a physical style of comedy, a slap shtick. To my way of understanding, the Marx Brothers were using the camera more to capture a gag than to be an instrument in the telling of the gag.
By comparison a revolutionary comedic producer in the cross over from cinema to television would be Benny Hill in that much of his comedy only made sense to a television audience that was fluent in cinema grammar - shot framing, editing and post sound fx were the tools to tell a gag… yep they don’t date well and perhaps jarring in content but the timing of the editing still makes me lol
Benny Hill was a big fan of Chaplin and it is easy to see it in his work. Benny was invited to Chaplin’s estate and while sitting at Charlie’s desk he saw that in the book case there were a collection of Benny Hill video tapes. He wept having never known before that his comedic mentor was a fan of his own comedy/craft.
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Warner Brothers, much to their credit, was doing it much earlier than their peers.
Plus there was William Stephenson, The British spy who worked closely with FDR to undermine American pro-Nazi efforts and get the US into the war.
Stephenson’s autobiography, “A Man Called Intrepid” is a breezy read. Worth picking up
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Not a film, but also written prior to the invasion of Poland.
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Paolo Nutini used an excerpt of Chaplin’s famous speech at the end of the film in his song Iron Sky:
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I’ve never been able to listen to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances without giggling since then.
I remember when in 1989 a local TV station celebrated Chaplin’s 100th birthday by showing his classics for a week: Gold Rush, The Circus, Modern Times. They showed the Great Dictator on April 20th - Hitler’s birthday.
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1937 saw the painting of Guernica, displayed at the Paris Exposition (which saw the monumental Nazi Germany and Soviet Union pavilions facing off against each other).
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