Just as the Second World War ended, the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham became a bestseller. Perhaps more than any other, the noir genre fitted the mood of Post–war America. It...
The 39 Steps is one of five films that Alfred Hitchcock made in England about espionage in the mid-to-late 1930s. These films capture the growing threat felt in Britain from foreign powers. In their scenarios the nation's security was nowhere more threatened than by spies hiding in plain sight...
In Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson continues to present an alternative world-view to filmgoers. It is one at odds with almost all that emanates from Hollywood, but, nevertheless, is one that finds a welcome reception in the real world, where family and marriage, patriotism and courage, faith and...
In Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos, it is as if there is an existential darkness present throughout. In this world, no matter how cunning the schemes or how fail-safe the get-away plans are, for all concerned there is a retribution coming. In Melville’s cinematic universe the wages of sin are...
The human and animal worlds are distinct, and relations between them are as much affected by Original Sin as all else in the universe. No amount of wishful thinking, no matter how well-intentioned or deluded, is going to change this...
Ireland has chosen between life and death. Death it shall have. The fallacy that a liberal abortion regime solves anything will soon become apparent to Irish citizens... Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The...
So brazenly was Britain's Culture of Death on display recently that the scales dropped from the eyes of any who wished to see. Many do not want to see, though, and look away as life support machines are turned off, and the full force of the law is used...
Sean O’Casey's play The Silver Tassie will grow in significance in the years ahead because it is a mirror that is now being held up to modern Ireland—a country which, like the crippled hero of the piece, can no longer cope with platitudes and half-truths, but which...
The body language of the band is one of a frozen watchfulness. Each band member has the look and stance of one who has witnessed something truly awful, and yet is powerless to do anything about it. Before their eyes, what the Rolling Stones were witnessing was...
Michael Herr left us one of the best accounts of men at war in his book, Dispatches. A reporter, he had gone to Vietnam to find a story, but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life... Dispatches by...
French director Abel Gance’s magnificent 1927 silent film Napoleon was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of an English schoolboy, who was given a film projector as a Christmas present... There are films about legendary figures...
When a death is reported, the first task is to identify the body. Who was the deceased? If, however, that somebody has deliberately left as few clues to her real identity as possible, then the identification is all...
Be careful what you read—it may change you, for better or worse.
In the case of Joseph Pearce, his early reading made him a violent white supremacist. It also landed him in jail. While there, he continued...
Just more than 100 years ago, an English Music Hall artist was invited to California to take a screen test. On set, soon after, he was dressed in a shabby black coat, with a cane and a battered...
