The Great Dictator late 1920s. "The Great Dictator" does feature several scenes without dialogue more in keeping with Chaplin's earlier films. The score was written and directed by Meredith Willson, later known as composer and librettist of the 1957 musical comedy "The Music Man": According to Willson, the scene in which Chaplin shaves a customer to "Brahms' Hungarian Dance" No. 5 had been filmed before he arrived, using a phonograph record for timing. Willson's task was to re-record it with the full studio orchestra, fitting the music to the action. They had planned to do it painstakingly, recording eight measures or less at
Dictator novel historical dictators. The genre of the dictator novel has been very influential in the development of a Latin American literary tradition, because many of the novelists rejected traditional, linear story-telling techniques, and developed narrative styles that blurred the distinctions between reader, narrator, plot, characters, and story. In examining the authority of leadership, the novelists also assessed their own social roles as paternalistic dispensers of wisdom, like that of the "caudillo" whose régime they challenged in their dictator novels. Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría argues that the dictator novel is “the most clearly indigenous thematic tradition in Latin American literature”, and