The Great Dictator something curiously appropriate about the little tramp impersonating the dictator, for by 1939 Hitler and Chaplin were perhaps the two most famous men in the world. The tyrant and the tramp reverse roles in "The Great Dictator", permitting the eternal outsider to address the masses". In "The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies" (1998), Kathryn Bernheimer writes, "What he chose to say in "The Great Dictator", however, was just what one might expect from the Little Tramp. Film scholars have often noted that the Little Tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure, the ostracized outcast, an outsider." Several reviewers of the late 20th
The Great Dictator holds a 92% "Fresh" rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 37 reviews, three of which are negative. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in May 2011. The extras feature color production footage shot by Chaplin's half-brother Sydney, deleted barbershop sequence from Chaplin's 1919 film "Sunnyside", barbershop sequence from Sydney Chaplin's 1921 film "King, Queen, Joker", a visual essay by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance titled "The Clown Turns Prophet", and "The Tramp and the Dictator"