Rick McGinnis

1 week ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

John "Paddy" Hemingway, the last surviving pilot who flew in the Battle of Britain, died in March of this year. He was 105. Hemingway was forced to bail out of his aircraft four times – three times in England and a fourth over enemy territory in Italy, where locals helped him get back to Allied lines.

2 weeks ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

If I know one thing about British comedian and actor Steve Coogan it's that nobody is lukewarm about him. Earlier this year Coogan played journalist and Labour MP Brian Walden in a Channel 4 drama about Walden's interview with Margaret Thatcher near the end of her reign as prime minister.

3 weeks ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

Last week I wrote about Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings and his dream house, in a film released in 1948 during an international housing crisis, and just before the effects of the postwar economic boom started to be felt in the United States. This week we're fast forwarding fourteen years, to another middle-class American everyman played by another Hollywood icon, at the peak of that boom, trying to enjoy a whole hard-earned month of summer holidays.

1 month ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House is remembered as a hit even though it lost money at the box office during its initial theatrical run. It's more accurate to say that the 1948 picture (and the book it was based on) was a cultural sensation, hitting a nerve with the American public during that anxious moment when World War II was over but nobody was confidently predicting a postwar economic boom that would last two decades.

1 month ago | steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn

Last week's column talked about a movie with an unlikeable main character. This week I'm afraid it's more of the same, only this time our main feature is a film with not one but two unsavory protagonists, one of them a moral delinquent, the other a monster of immense self regard and power. The only relief is that Sweet Smell of Success is in glorious black and white, and set in wonderful, terrible mid-century Manhattan.