War Movie Theatre | for Fans of Classic War Films and Cinema History · Robert Hutton & Duncan Weldon - War Movies Fans

The Wind That Shakes The Barley - with Padraig Reidy

·1 hr 29 min·5 clips

Kilmainham Jail’s tour skips the Civil War entirely, even though executions happened there.

The episode opens with a joke about wanting to be free from imperial oppression. Rob Hutton introduces War Movie Theatre, says he's off to London to learn to be a podcaster, and brings in Duncan Weldon and Cork-born writer, editor, and good causes campaigner Podrick Reedy for Fighting Irish Month, after the hosts decide they really need somebody Irish on the podcast. They offer him a shortlist of films and settle on The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Reedy says the choice is obvious for someone from Cork, and the discussion quickly turns to Cork people talking about Cork, being from Cork, and other Cork people. The film's Cork setting matters because it was shot there, and that local connection gives the episode its grounding. From there the hosts stay with the Irish War of Independence and the Black and Tans, treating the film less as a neat history lesson than as a story about imperial violence and the wider pattern around it. A key stretch of the conversation is the idea that the Black and Tans can be read through trauma: men who got back from the trenches and never really settled back into real life, stressed, far from home, and acting with a kind of unravelling fury rather than calculation. That reading is not used to excuse the violence. It is used to explain how exhausted men, hostile territory, and habits learned in war feed into the period's brutality. The episode also widens the lens to British politics in the 1920s, where meetings could be broken up by communists with weapons and counterforce followed. A dry joke or two keeps the pace moving, including a reference to Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders as another image of men shaped by violence. Reedy gives the discussion its Cork-specific weight, and the episode closes by pointing ahead to Michael Collins, plugging the site, and widening the point out again: Ireland matters, imperial history matters, and the film sits inside a larger conversation that is not finished in one tidy summary.

As heard by us

A war-film discussion that links Irish history, colonial violence, and trench trauma.

The episode uses The Wind That Shakes the Barley to talk through Irish history, colonial violence, and the question of what makes a war film feel tied to a place instead of floating above it.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want an Irish war film put back inside its history and politics, not just reviewed.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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