The Great Dictator in 1945, it became the most popular film of the year, with admissions of 8,280,553. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance concludes his lengthy examination of the film, in his book "Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema", by asserting the film's importance among the great film satires. Vance writes, "Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" survives as a masterful integration of comedy, politics and satire. It stands as Chaplin's most self-consciously political work and the cinema's first important satire." There is no critical consensus on the relationship between Chaplin's earlier Tramp character and the film's Jewish barber, but the trend is to view the barber
Roman dictator to reconstitute the symbols of the kings, the lictors of the dictator never removed the axes from their fasces, even within the pomerium. Symbolizing their power over life and death, the axes of a dictator's lictors set him apart from all other magistrates. In an extraordinary sign of deference, the lictors of other magistrates could not bear fasces at all when appearing before the dictator. As the kings had been accustomed to appear on horseback, this right was forbidden to the dictator, unless he first received permission from the "comitia". In addition to holding a military command and carrying out