When I was a boy, there was a railroad track we drove across every day that ran very close to a brick factory building; and on the side of the building, there was a sign that read "Will Not Clear A Man." Growing up, I always wondered about that sign. When I was older, I realized what it meant. Trains often had railroad men hanging onto the sides of them, for various reasons. That sign was there to tell the engineer that the space between the building and train was too narrow to accommodate a man hanging onto the side of it: he would be knocked off.

Today, our culture is very much like the side of that building: it is designed to knock a man - a real man - off the side of the train he is riding so he cannot "clear" it. It throws obstacles in his path that become increasingly harder to "clear." MORE

John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, The Horsemen) cut his directorial teeth on television in its golden era (the 1950's and 60's), and is today probably the second best director of thrillers after Hitchcock. From his time in television, he mastered the art of black and white realism which was so popular in the 60's. It is the brutality of his realism, among other things, that makes him such a powerful director of the thriller genre. There isn't a romantic bone in his body, which is why he's not one of my favorite directors. But I appreciate him.

The Train may very well be his masterpiece. It is the little known but true story of how the Nazi's tried to steal the art treasures of Paris near the end of World War II. On the very eve of the Allies marching in, the Nazi's were transporting the works of Picasso, Degas and others out via train. MORE

The word "story" comes from the word "history." Since all words retain the basic nature of their root, originally all stories were considered to be historical or true. They were narratives of real people and events. There was no such thing as a fictional or non-historical story.

When people were sitting around the fire at night, and someone said, "Tell us a story," what they were saying was, "Tell us some history about ourselves." MORE

When I was an adolescent, I was a huge H. G. Wells fan. I loved his imagination, as well as his academic precision. Not only was he a fiction writer, he was a scientist, an historian, a sociologist and a teacher. Along with Jules Verne, he is known as the Father of Science Fiction.

The War Of The Worlds is one of four of his books that are considered masterpieces and have been made into films. (The others are The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The First Men In The Moon.) MORE

Only one member of the jury believes the boy on trial may be innocent (Henry Fonda). The others are totally convinced of his guilt. Over the course of the film, they debate the evidence and, one-by-one, change their minds. How that happens is what makes this such a remarkable film, and one of the true gems of screenwriting. MORE

Similarly, opinions cannot be proven. That is something truth and opinions have in common, and why we tend to argue about those things. Unfortunately, many Christians see the two as the same. MORE