This movie intersperses funny and shocking. The former derives from Charlie Chaplin’s parody of the fascist leader “Phooey” (= Führer), which is quite funny even if not entirely fair; the latter is the sudden violence of storm troopers breaking things up in the ghetto. Even these scenes often have comic relief in the second Chaplin figure, the amnesic Jewish barber.
There is one self-deprecating scene that shows at least an attempt at even-handedness. A bunch of Jews are sitting around the table, about to eat, with the knowledge that the one with a coin baked into his biscuit is chosen for a suicide mission against the state. As each one discovers the token of death in his biscuit, he tries to sneak it in to one of the other Jews’ biscuits; it is excellent slapstick.
A curious line is put into the mouths of the fascists: “We’ve just discovered the most marvelous poison gas. It will kill everybody.” Recall that this movie was released in 1940, at least two years before the date usually given for the onset of the death camps.
Paulette Goddard is cute in her role as feisty ghetto Jewess.
The “marvelous poison gas” refers to the gas used against the soldiers in the trenches during World War I. The use of these chemical-warfare agents (first by the Germans, then by the British and French) horrified the world, and would not have been forgotten 25 years later.