Bryn Coates-Davies The Emperor’s Club (2002, directed by Michael Hoffman) stars Kevin Kline as a History teacher who works at a prestigious boys’ boarding school in the 1970s. Kline’s character, William Hundert, is a strict teacher of the history of the Roman Empire. He teaches a very structured class until Sedgewick Bell, a senator’s son, certified bad boy, and potential… Read more »
Hochelaga: Not a Real Thesis Defence Scott Berthelette A Ph.D. thesis defence is at the centre of the narrative in Hochelaga, terre des âmes (Hochelaga, Land of Souls), a Canadian historical drama film released in 2017. The film’s portrayal of the process hardly meets my expectations for how a defence normally unfolds. The story of Hochelaga is told through a… Read more »
Colin M. Coates In the 1966 Hollywood film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, Richard Burton plays a cantankerous, disappointed, middle-aged History professor at a small liberal arts college in New England. “George” (Burton) has reason to be grumpy. He feels thwarted in his career and his relationship. He is married to “Martha” (Elizabeth Taylor), a foul-mouthed “femme fatale” who constantly… Read more »
National Treasure (2004): I Need More Galas Claire Campbell I need more galas. Scroll through reviews of National Treasure (2004) on Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB and you’ll notice a lot of critics describing the movie as a kind of set-in-America Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Da Vinci Code (then in production for 2006). After all, it’s an adventure… Read more »
By Alan MacEachern As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford has come to embody the archaeologist on film. Why hasn’t he done the same for, or to, historians? In Patriot Games (1992), the actor plays Jack Ryan, a professor of naval history who thwarts an assassination attempt in London. The movie is based on Tom Clancy’s novel, an early entry in the… Read more »
Coming to a screen near you Colin Coates This summer season, Active History is providing a series of posts on historians in the movies. These are not necessarily historical films – although we know as well as anyone that every film is a product of its time and place. No, these are films that feature historians (and people in allied… Read more »
