Popular Culture
In his book "Why Britain is at War", Harold Nicolson used the behaviour of George Smith and his repeatedly murderous behaviour as a parallel to Hitler's repeatedly acquisitive behaviour in Europe in the 1930s. In Evelyn Waugh's book "Unconditional Surrender", which is set during the Second World War, General Whale is referred to as "Brides-in-the-bath" because all the operations he sponsored seemed to require the extermination of all involved. The Smith case is mentioned in Dorothy L. Sayers' mystery, Unnatural Death. It was also mentioned in Agatha Christie's Miss Marple's "A Caribbean Mystery". Margery Allingham's short story "Three Is a Lucky Number" (1955) adapts the events and refers to James Joseph Smith and his Brides. The Smith case was dramatised on the radio series The Black Museum in 1952 under the title of "The Bath Tub". Czechoslovak Television's series Adventures of Criminology (1990), based on famous criminal cases in which new methods of investigation were used, depicts this case in the episode Reconstruction. There was also The Brides in the Bath (2003), a British TV movie made by Yorkshire Television, starring Martin Kemp as George Smith and the play Tryst by Karoline Leach, first produced in New York in 2006, starring Maxwell Caulfield and Amelia Campbell. This story is the basis for the play The Drowning Girls by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson, Daniela Vlaskalic.
Read more about this topic: George Joseph Smith
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“And all the popular statesmen say
That purity built up the State
And after kept it from decay;
Admonish us to cling to that
And let all base ambition be,
For intellect would make us proud....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)