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) becoming a byword for intelligent, topical, articulate action romps that slightly send themselves up.", although he also notes that, given the 1997 setting of the first Samuel Carver novel, his age in this one would be somewhat unrealistic. Rich Westwood, reviewing for "Euro Crime", stated that "Dictator is an ideal holiday novel for a thriller fan, with a hard-as-nails protagonist, satisfyingly gritty action sequences, beautiful women and a collection of very nasty baddies". The novel was also well reviewed by G.S. of "CrimeSquad", who awarded it five out of five and commented that "Dictator is an outstanding novel which has