What is The Great Dictator about?
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.
A ruthless dictator's ambition clashes with a Jewish barber's struggle, creating a darkly comic, epic satire.
Satirical and earnest, with dry wit. A full-attention watch at a measured pace. Emotionally it is heavy.
Streaming on Prime Video, Max, Criterion, Kanopy (free) and YouTube (free).
The Great Dictator parents guide
There is no US rating to lean on. What we tagged stays mild: some violence and no gore.
- Scare
- Mildly scary
- A few tense or eerie moments.
- Jump scares
- None noted
- Gore
- No gore
- Violence
- Some violence
- Some fighting or peril.
- Sex and nudity
- None flagged
- It has no US rating to check against, so treat our zero as unconfirmed.
- Language
- None flagged
- It has no US rating to check against, so treat our zero as unconfirmed.
How we rate: an AI reads what is known about each title and tags it 0 to 3; we check the tags against a hand-rated set and correct them by hand when readers tell us. Estimates, not a scene-by-scene review. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Three questions
- Is The Great Dictator scary?
- Only a little. The Great Dictator has a few tense moments, nothing that follows you to bed.
- How gory is The Great Dictator?
- No gore and some violence. Squeamish viewers are fine here.
Cast and crew
Directed byCharlie Chaplin
StarringCharlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert
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The Great Dictator is on our Dry and witty, Classics (pre-1970), Prime Video, Comedy on Prime Video and Max lists.
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Uses the TMDB API; not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Intensity, content, tone and pace tags are CouchRot's own.