Great Movies to Watch Where the King Loses

That said, this is an inherently democratic list, which means we are not including movies where a bad king loses, only to be replaced by a “good” king. So that means you won’t see The Return of the King or The Lion King, no version of Robin Hood and absolutely, positively no Dune.

And in the spirit of democracy, feel free to mention any movies we missed in the comments. After all, not even the writer of this article wants to lord over others, but would rather build a community with others.

The Great Dictator (1940)

As the name suggests, the king in question in this 1940 Charlie Chaplin classic The Great Dictator is a dictator, namely Tomainian ruler Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin). As Hynkel builds his massive military empire, a barber (also Chaplin) deals with trauma from World War I while living in a Jewish ghetto governed by his wartime ally Schultz (Reginald Gardiner). As Schultz earns the ire of Hynkel, the barber gets drawn into the larger political milieu, leading to the movie’s most famous scene. At Schultz’s urging, the barber, disguised as the dictator, pretends to by Hynkel and addresses the crowd.

The barber’s speech urging for peace and human connection across borders was as inspirational as it was surprising. By 1940, talking pictures had dominated Hollywood for more than a decade, but Chaplin had been a silent holdout, making his spoken lines a shift for the actor. Chaplin was also a public anti-war crusader (despite agreeing to make the patriotic film Shoulder Arms (1918), and his words carried more strength as Hitler and Mussolini waged war across Europe. Finally, there’s the dark reversal of The Great Dictator, in which Hynkel himself gets mistaken for the barber and sent to a concentration camp, a bleak, but ironically fitting, end.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The Wizard of Oz doesn’t have a proper king, but it does have not one, not two, but three bad leaders who get deposed over the course of the classical musical. The first, of course, is the Wicked Witch of the East, who dies in a housing crisis. The second is the Wicked Witch of the West, who shares the same weakness as the aliens from Signs.

The third, of course, is the Wizard himself, who insists that he’s a very good man, despite operating as a despot in the Emerald City. So when Dorothy and her coalition of rebels finally challenge him, the Wizard repents and decides to join them, stepping away from being a monarch. Sure, he pronounces the Scarecrow as a new “ruler,” which does bump against our rules against movies in which kings replace kings, but we’ll let that slide, hoping that Scarecrow learned a lesson about the power of the people while paling around with his friends.

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