Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall. Photograph: AFP.
There is a story that Hitler was so enamoured of Clark Gable that he once fantasised about having the Hollywood star play him in a biopic. As luck would have it he got Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and was apparently unimpressed.
I'm guessing he'd be similarly irked by Dani Levy's portrayal in the new German comedy Mein Fuhrer. Firstly, because Levy is actually Jewish, and secondly because he has opted to play Hitler as an impotent, drug-taking bed-wetter. Levi has explained that he conceived his interpretation as a riposte to Bruno Ganz's anguished tour-de-force in 2004's Downfall.
In so doing he implies that satire, not drama, is the best means of tackling tyranny on film. This argument is further bolstered by Forest Whitaker's performance in The Last King of Scotland, which casts the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the role of a buffoonish (if deadly) pantomime villain.
I don't think there are any hard and fast rules about this. Both approaches - the serious or the comic - seem an entirely valid way of depicting the true-life acts of historical monsters. It's simply that the latter tends to be a more high-risk venture. Viewers might nervously give a dull, pompous drama about the Rwandan genocide or the Nazi Holocaust the benefit of the doubt. A misconceived, misfiring comedy about the same subject matter, however, is liable to be thrown to the wolves (the big exception being Roberto Benigni's dubious, inexplicably popular Life is Beautiful).
Maybe that's why most film-makers are wary of going down that road. In later years Chaplin came to regret making The Great Dictator - had he known about the full horror of Nazi Germany, he said, he would never have played Hitler as a figure of fun.
By the same token, those images of Saddam (whether it be brutal life or grisly end) are surely too raw in the memory to permit a "hilarious" or "irreverent" take on the former dictator, at least for the moment. Certainly it would be a brave director who dared to try it. Brave ... or just really, really stupid.
