...I knew the bones of the story of the Guildford Four but I didn’t know all of the details...I feel for sure that if there had been the death penalty...none of the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven would have lived....it’s so sad obviously that Giuseppe never saw his freedom again and never got to be reunited with his beloved wife and daughters...but I wished Gerry had lived longer as well, 60yrs old is a very young age still and to have had to go through terminal cancer as well ..too, too sad and so wrong....life can be so relentless and cruel to some...they never shared the same cell, though...I read that the only communication they were allowed with each other was through letter, they weren’t given any actual contact...And it wasn’t really expressed in the movie how much ‘coercion’ and the methods they would have actually suffered to have signed those confessions...I also hadn’t known that it had been hidden that their innocence was known for so long...as it said, they weren’t looking for justice, for the actual who coldly took those lives in the pub...they were looking to ‘fill some Irish boxes’ or fill some prison cells with Irish people...shame is the only word really, shame on everyone who was a part of that concealment...but no arrests for them, no facing a courtroom themselves...

Great movie, Daniel Day Lewis is so good in it, obviously it's very close to home and I do remember experiencing some of the anti-Irishness in London myself back in the 90's when i lived there for a couple of years and at that point it wasn't even as bad as it would have been in the 70's and 80's. That mentality of just having someone locked up, anyone is so awful. Why wouldn't you want to find the real people. The whole thing was a disgrace and they weren't the only innocent Irish people made the fall guys for IRA bombings either

...yeah, my own dad was a man who came over to England from NI so I kept relating that it could have been him...and the same with the Maguire 7, the extended family that so many Irish had living here also...there were only a few of my dad’s siblings who stayed back home and most of them were in England with a few in the USA....it was nice to read of that huge wave of support for Gerry in America...

Oh I never realised your dad was from Northern Ireland, did you tell me that before?

...I’m not sure if I did but yeah, he came over as a young man and met my granddad..(...my mum’s dad ...)...who was in the pub giving away daughters at the time to nice young men..I mean, so many people came over so that could have happened to anyone through that time....

:laugh2:

Can't believe I've only just got around to watching this now, war movies always turn me off for some reason. It was a lot different to what i thought it was going to be about, I thought it was about a guy who helped smuggle Jewish people out of Poland to safe countries so yeah i was wrong about that :laugh: What a fantastic film, very hard to watch in parts though, it still amazes me how so many people could be so evil towards other human beings, it's really sad and disappointing actually. What a guy Schindler was though, to hold his nerve like that when dealing with a monster like Ralph Fiennes character, he had a real talent for manipulation I think but used it in such a good way (after a rocky start) The part when the women and children ended up in Auschwitz and were herded into the shower blocks and the terror of thinking they were minutes away from death, that scene was horrifying and the part where the guard pulled away all the kids when they were being taken out of there, again Schindler had nerves of steel, he had to take on all these Nazis and use pretty much only his confidence/arrogance and air of Authority to save those children when really he had none and he pulled it off. Anyway amazing film, can't believe I let it pass me by for so long

...it’s such a down movie, it’s difficult to say that a re-watch was an enjoyable experience as such...it’s just a very, very tragic story ...not just for Cecelia and Robbie but also for Briony who survived the war to a much older age and had to live with her misunderstanding for her whole life...

...I read the book many years ago, before the movie, obviously....and I hadn’t known of Saoirse at the time as an actress...Atonement was the very first movie I saw her in and became aware of her, I think...it’s an obvious Irish name but she had a perfect English accent and so perfectly cast...accents were obviously something she excelled at as a child as well, I would say...James and Kiera, also very well cast..:love:...