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
Dictator novel as being one of structure, and therefore the problem of the state "manifested through the will of some monstrous personage violating the ordinary individual's privacy, both of home and of consciousness." In the early twentieth century, the Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán's "Tirano Banderas" (1926) acted as a key influence on those authors whose goal was to critique power structures and the status quo. Latin American novels that explore political themes, but that do not centre upon the rule of a particular dictator, are informally classified as “not quite dictator novels”. For example, "Libro de Manuel" (A Manual for Manuel, 1973),