Hollywood and American Foreign Policy
Hollywood and American Foreign Policy
Lecturer: Colin Shindler
Most of us lived through the Cold War, but now it’s history. The Western Allies and their implacable foes, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, provided the setting for so many different kinds of films. From the James Bond thriller From Russia with Love to the black comedy of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the Cold War was a constant factor in our lives. This lecture includes excerpts from those famous films plus The Third Man and Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to the lesser known but equally illuminating views of the Cold War like The Big Lift, Guilty by Treason and Billy Wilder’s comedy One, Two, Three.
Colin Shindler has been lecturing on American and British social and cultural history for over 20 years. He was awarded his PhD at Cambridge University and subsequently lectured on film for their History Faculty between 1998 and 2019 exploring its relationship to modern British and American social and cultural history. He also teaches a variety of adult education courses. Between 1975 and 1999 he pursued a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and film. He won a BAFTA award for his production of A Little Princess. His production of Young Charlie Chaplin was nominated for a US Prime Time Emmy. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Buster and was the producer of various television dramas such as Lovejoy and Wish Me Luck. He has written three novels as well as numerous television scripts and radio plays but regards his greatest cultural contribution as choosing the title music for the police series Juliet Bravo. He is best known for his childhood memoir Manchester United Ruined My Life which was short listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.