At the Jan. 3 AFI Awards, Mel Brooks interrupted his speech about the American Film Institute’s women directors program to praise Taika Waititi for Searchlight’s “Jojo Rabbit.” However, he joked, the filmmaker “did not ask my permission to use Hitler!”
It got a big laugh (as Brooks usually does) for the reference to his 1968 movie “The Producers” and the 2001 musical. Brooks may be synonymous with comedic Nazis, but he hardly invented the concept.
On Aug. 14, 1940, Variety hailed the Hitler-Mussolini satire “The Great Dictator” as “probably the motion picture industry’s greatest one-man show,” because Charlie Chaplin, wrote, directed, starred and totally financed the $2.2 million film himself. The reviewer wrote, “The preaching is strong, notably in the six-minute speech at the finish, but also in the comedy.”
Two years later, Ernst Lubitsch directed (from Edwin Justus Meyer’s script) “To Be or Not to Be,” a 1942 film about Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland.
It got a big laugh (as Brooks usually does) for the reference to his 1968 movie “The Producers” and the 2001 musical. Brooks may be synonymous with comedic Nazis, but he hardly invented the concept.
On Aug. 14, 1940, Variety hailed the Hitler-Mussolini satire “The Great Dictator” as “probably the motion picture industry’s greatest one-man show,” because Charlie Chaplin, wrote, directed, starred and totally financed the $2.2 million film himself. The reviewer wrote, “The preaching is strong, notably in the six-minute speech at the finish, but also in the comedy.”
Two years later, Ernst Lubitsch directed (from Edwin Justus Meyer’s script) “To Be or Not to Be,” a 1942 film about Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland.
- 1/29/2020
- by Tim Gray
- Variety Film + TV
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