So Sony has put the kibosh on “Interview,” the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg comedy about bungling American journos attempting to assassinate Kim Jong-un – which, let’s face it, is a lose, lose, lose situation for everyone.

“The bad guys won,” inveterate tweeter Mia Farrow pronounced. But whom is she kidding? No movie theater is going to show a flick that audience members sit through looking over their shoulders – as The Christian Science Monitor shrewdly observes.

Trust me, I know. I went to see “The Dark Knight Rises” with my pal novelist Barbara Nachman shortly after a gunman opened fire at a screening of the movie in a Colorado theater. We spent most of the movie watching every young man who came in or, especially, left and came back. That’s not entertainment.

As with any complex story involving hacking, terrorist threats in a post-9/11 world, freedom of speech and corporate profits, there’s another side to “The Interview” debacle.

What if Rogan and company had simply made the North Korean dictator a fictional character?

Charlie Chaplin did it in “The Great Dictator” (1940), playing both a Jewish everyman through which we see the disastrous circumstances that plunged Europe into two world wars and a certain dictator, one Adenoid Hynkel of Tomainia. Of course, it was Hitler right down to his little moustache. (How any woman ever found him attractive is beyond me.) Of course, it stirred up antifascist sentiments at the time America was not yet in the fight – which was just what Chaplin wanted to do. Still, Chaplin could say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” etc. ...