Lindsay Anderson's film If, set in a school like this, contains a climactic scene where the heroes machine-gun parents' day from the roof of the chapel.
Hero Frankie Machine is a shrewd poker dealer whose "golden arm" shakes as he relies on morphine to overcome the pain of a war injury and to numb the guilt he feels for a drunken spree that put his wife, Sophie, in a wheelchair.
It's utter tosh, but it's hard not to be ever so slightly impressed by a sequence that drops a parachuting tank out of an aeroplane and allows our heroes to machine-gun enemy fighters from the vehicle's open turret.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is starring in two films – one a Hollywood thriller featuring the camouflage-clad hero firing a machine gun into the sky and the other a sombre documentary accusing him of human rights abuses.
In the overselling style that characterizes "Sutton," which is billed as a novel, Mr. Moehringer declaims about his hero: "Smarter than Machine Gun Kelly, saner than Pretty Boy Floyd, more likable than Legs Diamond, more peaceable than Dutch Schultz, more romantic than Bonnie and Clyde, Sutton saw bank robbery as high art and went about it with an artist's single-minded zeal".
Connor, you will recall, is the resistance hero whom the machines tried to wipe out by sending California's future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to whack his mom.
Kurosawa-inspired bickering buddies C-3PO and R2-D2 have been bleep-blooping benevolently across our screens for nearly four decades, and the ranks of kindly machine heroes have been boosted in more recent times by Brad Bird's Iron Giant, Pixar's Wall-E and Baymax from Disney's Big Hero Six.
In Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, the hero is time-machined back to Paris in the twenties (Woody never explains how, just a tolling midnight church bell and a certain Square), where he encounters many celebrated figures of that age.
He waited his turn as a half-dozen young men crowded around the machine, the hero kicking and punching through his enemies.
