The Church’s ‘war’ on Hollywood, which I’ve been writing about in recent weeks, was ratcheted up in the 1930s by Cardinal George Mundelein. One of America’s most influential figures, he urged his congregation to shun films of questionable ethics. As a result, over eight million Catholics took a pledge against watching ‘impurity’ on screen. That…
I recently wrote about the film industry’s problems with the Catholic Church in the early years of the last century. Falling audiences were an associated problem. The Depression almost killed off the industry. After it ended, a bacchanalian atmosphere reigned, leading to material unsuitable for family audiences appearing in a profusion of the works being…
Being July, the silly season, there are many blockbusters as well as sequels and remakes on our screens now. With the children being off school there’s much fare to suit them too, animated features like Smurfs, The Bad Guys 2 and The Girl Who Leapt Through Fire. Scarlet Johansson is the draw for Jurassic World:…
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…