4,270 words

David Lean (1908–1991) directed sixteen movies, fully half of them classics, including three of the greatest films ever made: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and, greatest of them all, Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Lawrence of Arabia is repeatedly ranked as one of the finest films of all time, and when one compares it to such overpraised items as Citizen Kane and Casablanca, a strong case can be made for putting it at the very top of the list. (more…)

N. C. Wyeth, The Burning of the Bounty, 1940.

1,466 words

For men on the Right, observable truths about the state of Western civilization intersect like the threads of an unraveling tapestry. We see order giving into chaos; tyranny and anarchy converging and becoming indiscernible in the stew of nature, oppression, freedom, injustice, security, peace, and conflict. (more…)

1,541 words

Michael Powell (1905–1990) is one of the tragic geniuses of film: a genius because he is one of the most visually dazzling directors in the history of cinema, tragic because he too often wasted his talents on inferior scripts, most of them provided by his longtime collaborator, Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian-Jewish refugee to whom Powell often gave co-director credit.  (more…)

George Barbier, “Eventails (Fans)”

7,971 words

Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)

4,044 words

Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that established parliamentary and Protestant rule in Britain, the Anglo-Americans have been on the winning side in every major international conflict.

— Walter Russell Mead (more…)

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In the 1960s, there was a series of nostalgic, pro-colonial movies. One of them is Khartoum (1966). Although produced and directed by different people, Khartoum is a prequel to an earlier pro-British Empire classic, The Four Feathers (1939). Ralph Richardson had a role in both movies, playing Prime Minister William E. Gladstone in Khartoum.

The British have a strange pride in their actions in the Sudan. (more…)

1,421 words

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born 150 years ago today in Bombay, India, to a cultivated English family of artists and academics. After an often unhappy childhood at school in England, he returned to his beloved India where he worked as a journalist, short story writer, and author of light verse (including the original Barrack-Room Ballads).  (more…)