Author: Pete Johnson
Guerra Civil: The Spanish Civil War on Film
From 1936 until 1939, Spain was torn apart by a bitter civil war. This almost forgotten conflict was the precursor to the world war that soon followed, and was one of the bitterest, and cruellest civil wars in modern times. You would need to read a book, and there are many to choose from, for…
Cowboys and Indians: Native Americans and cinema
For most of my youth, films featuring Red Indians (as we called them back then) followed a simple formula. The Indians were all bad, and attacked white settlers, wagon trains, and any soldiers sent out to discipline them. They all wore warpaint, had feathered headgear, and generally used weapons like tomahawks, and bows and arrows.…
Blood and Bandages: Paramedics on film
For most of my life, I have only ever seen ambulance crews and paramedics portrayed in two ways on film. They were either the much respected platoon medic, featured in so many war films, particularly American ones, or the laughable buffoons of English comedies, in particular, the ‘Carry On’ series. In the latter, ambulancemen were…
A trip to “The Pictures”: Watching movies in Post-WWII London
In London’s working class districts, during the late 1950s and well into the late 1960s, you did not hear the phrase ‘going to the cinema’. It would always be ‘going to the pictures’, or the common slang term, ‘the flicks’. This was a hangover from the earliest days of silent film, when the flickering of…
Thank You, Mr. Welles: Definitive actor, consummate director, and true auteur
Orson Welles is considered by many to be the greatest film maker in history. I do not necessarily agree with that, although I do consider him to be one of the greatest actors of all time. His voice alone is worth a career, let alone his charismatic presence in a film. As a very young…