The 1969 Jiri Menzel film from Czechoslovakia, “Larks on a String,” which I saw on Amazon Prime, is a work of sad, anti-Communist satire and comic humanism. In tone it resembles Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains,” both films based on novels by Bohumil Hrabal.

“Larks” concerns the limited worth of thought and ideas and the withering of spiritual values in a totalitarian society. (Intellectuals here are working in a junkyard.) It reveals the Red glorification of work being turned into a religion. An example of the satire is the sequence with a Communist trustee (Rudolf Hrusinsky) who clearly believes in the “new man.” He charitably washes the faces of underprivileged children before slipping into a flat wherein he contentedly bathes a young gypsy woman’s bosom and ass. The new man?

Arthur Penn‘s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) is a violent entertainment written by two men who want it to harbor some serious overtones. It doesn’t really, except that, being relentlessly tragicomic, its comedy is comic indeed and its tragedy, with realistic bloodshed, is tragic indeed. It isn’t frivolous. Or inartistically made. Superbly directed by Penn, who knew how to be powerful, and edited by Dede Allen, its camera placement and camera movement are marvels. The screenwriters are David Newman and Robert Benton, and one wonders why Benton couldn’t give us in 1984 something better than “Places in the Heart.”

The novelist Piers Paul Read wants us to know that the real Vitellio Scarpia, an 18th century Sicilian soldier for the Papal States, was not “sadistic,” as he is apparently shown to be in a play by one Victorien Sardou. Rather, in Read’s book “Scarpia” (2015), he is humane, dutiful, respectful of Catholicism—as well as highly imperfect. But not a cur.

In addition, Scarpia is anti-Jacobin, living when revolutionary France does bloody-minded harm to Italy. Not surprisingly for a Read novel, the subject of salvation crops up. The Arletty of Rome, the woman who sleeps with French Jacobins—Scarpia’s estranged wife, Paola—is the only character in the book who after repentance reaches a deep Christian devotion. One person, maybe more, has considered this Catholic propaganda. It is nothing of the sort. The conversion is one occurrence among many, taking place, remember, in Catholic Italy. And this book—riveting if not always satisfactorily edited—is not preachy at all.

The country the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraq, eventually became a site of horrid domestic war. Based on actual events, the 2019 film “Mosul,” a Netflix production, focuses on the fighting against ISIS conducted by the Iraqi men who make up the Ninevah SWAT Team. These men would never be inclined to side with ISIS. “F*** you and what you stand for!” a commander named Jasem shouts at an ISIS member he has just killed. Suhail Dabbach is true and virile as Jasem, a decent man, and the other actors make no missteps either. Smartly directed and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, “Mosul” is a movie wherein the presence of disgusting terrorists makes it impossible for the item to be antiwar.

I have been watching episodes of the old Mission: Impossible TV series (Season 2, 1967) starring Peter Graves, et al. They have a gravity the MI movies with Tom Cruise do not have. What is also noteworthy is the mode of labor of men and women at a time before feminism, whatever its virtues, came in and spoiled 50 percent of what goes on in TV shows and movies. Cinnamon Carter, played by the classy Barbara Bain, is a brave agent in one accord with the men she works with. She cooperates with them and they with her, and she harbors no anti-sexist agenda. It must be conceded, though, that the men are decent. (Everyone on the Right Side is decent.) They would never sexually harass anyone. Their attitude toward women is what it should be. In fact I can’t help sensing that Cinnamon knows this and loves it.