As fireplace salesman-turned-Education Secretary Gavin Williamson enters the ‘cancel culture’ wars with his planned campus ‘free speech law’, what better time to investigate the phenomenon as depicted in the movies?
There are a surprising number of films that deal with the subject, from every side of the political spectrum, with right-wingers, the left and libertarians all on the receiving end of censorship from the authorities at some point.
As always, the focus will be on more recent movies, but first it’s worth mentioning a few older pictures that paved the way for later films.
In the 1930s-set The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), the titular educator (Maggie Smith) is ejected due to her romanticised view of fascism, whilst in Marathon Man (1976), Dustin Hoffman’s mature Ph.D. student Babe Levy lives in the shadow of the suicide of his father, an academic blacklisted in the McCarthy era.
Professor Marston & The Wonder Women (2017) – Amazon Rent/Buy
This absorbing real-life drama reveals the story of US psychologist William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), who created comic book character Wonder Woman.
The
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