Last week I wrote about Will Hays, Fr Daniel Lord and the formation of the Production Code Administration (PCA). This prohibited the release of films deemed anathema to a Catholic ethos in early Hollywood. I mentioned the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal. Some years before, there was the drug death of Wallace Reid and the murder of…
Last week I wrote about Cecil B. De Mille vis-a-vis Catholic ideology in his films. One of the scenes in his 1932 feature The Sign of the Cross contained an erotic dance. Catholic audiences were outraged, so much so that Presbyterian deacon Will H. Hays, who’d been employed by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors…
Cecil B. De Mille was the most prolific director of religious films in history. He even made one of them twice – The Ten Commandments in both 1923 and 1956. De Mille held fervent beliefs but always had one eye on the box office. He said once, “Why turn down 2000 years of free publicity?”…
A director shouts “Action!” In front of him stands his wife. How is she going to respond? Will she say, “Yes, sir, no sir, three bags full, sir” or will she be difficult? Will she freeze? Some people perform better at their chosen avocations when their loved ones are watching them. Others ‘corpse.’ There are…
People of a certain age will remember Radharc, the documentary series funded in 1962 by the then Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. This month there are free shows at the Irish Film Institute at lunchtime on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays of two of its seminal films, both a half hour long. You can also…
What do you do when your children have left home, your house has been repossessed, you’ve just lost your life savings and you’ve been given a dire medical diagnosis? That’s easy. You walk 650 miles along Britain’s South-East coast with a backpack, a makeshift tent and a few refreshments to tide you by. As Samuel…
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning has just been released. Taking up where 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One left off, has Tom Cruise trying to stop assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) destroying Civilisation as we know it with an AI thingamabob called The Entity. Somebody once said they should never have been allowed to make all those…
Nicolas Cage has been flying under the radar for so many years now we could be forgiven for forgetting just how great an actor he is. With two Oscar nominations in his quiver (one converted) and a plethora of other awards, his career should be the envy of many more hyped talents. Fighting off charges…
Two worlds. In one of them a tinpot Don Corleone called Power (Aidan Gillen) presides over a ruthless drugs ring. In the other, shellshocked ex-Afghanistan soldier Danny (Luke McQuillan) makes a bid for shared custody of his son with his long-suffering wife Gill (Jade Jordan), aided by kind-hearted social worker Kate (Louise Bourke) after a…
Richard Burton was the twelfth of thirteen children born in the Welsh village of Pontrhydyfen 100 years ago. His mother died two years later. Richard Jenkins – his birth name – would probably have spent his working life ‘down the mines’ like his father and most of the other male inhabitants of the village were…