The Great Dictator the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film. He used it to inspire many elements of "The Great Dictator", and by repeatedly viewing this film, Chaplin could closely mimic Hitler's mannerisms. Trimborn suggests that Chaplin decided to proceed with making "The Great Dictator" after viewing Riefenstahl's film. Hynkel's rally speech near the beginning of the film, delivered in German-sounding gibberish, is a caricature of Hitler's oratory style, which Chaplin also studied carefully in newsreels. The film was directed by Chaplin (with his half-brother Wheeler Dryden as assistant director), and written and produced by Chaplin.
Dictator novel traces the development of this theme from “as far back as Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s and Francisco López de Gómara’s accounts of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico.” The nineteenth century saw significant literary reflections on political power, though on the whole the dictator novel is associated with the Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. For critic Gerald Martin, the dictator novel marks the end of the Boom and even (as he says of Roa Bastos's "I, the Supreme") “the end of an entire era in Latin American history, the era which had stretched from Sarmiento's "Facundo"