had featured "fair and featureless" heroines, the casting of Paulette Goddard suggested that his female characters might be presented with more personality than previously. He also voiced concern that the film would be considered to be a Communist film when in reality Chaplin's message was predominantly apolitical. As Greene explains, "[Chaplin] presents, he doesn't offer political solutions." French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty named their journal, Les Temps modernes, after it. Modern Times earned $1.8 million in North American theatrical rentals during its release, becoming one of the top-grossing films of 1936. It was the most popular film at the British box office in 1935–36. The iconic depiction of Chaplin working frantically to keep up with an assembly line inspired later comedy routines including Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face (Donald Duck alternately assembling artillery shells and saluting portraits of Adolf Hitler) and an episode of I Love Lucy titled "Job Switching" (Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up with an ever-increasing volume of chocolate candies, eventually stuffing them in their mouths, hats, and blouses). The opening of a fantasy sequence in the film, in which the unemployed factory worker trips over a footstool upon entering the living room of his "dream home" with the Gamin, inspired a similar opening to The Dick Van Dyke Show. This was Chaplin's first overtly political-themed film, and its unflattering portrayal of industrial society generated controversy in some quarters upon its initial release. Writing in The Liberal News, the official magazine of the British Liberal Party, in October 1936, Willoughby Dewar observed Modern Times "should be seen by every Young Liberal. It is, among other things, a piece of first-class Liberal propaganda." Nazi Germany propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels banned the film from being shown in the regime because of its alleged advocacy of communism. The film exhibits slight similarities to a lesser known 1931 French film directed by René Clair entitled À nous la liberté (Liberty for Us) – the assembly line sequence is an instance in that both films depict it, but in different ways. The German film company Tobis Film, hungry for cash, sued Chaplin following the film's release to no avail. They sued again after World War II (considered revenge for Chaplin's anti-Nazi statements in The Great Dictator). This time, they settled with Chaplin out of court. Clair, a friend and huge admirer of Chaplin who was flattered that