When did film violence get ‘real,’ wonders Martin Amis in a personal history of big screen brutality in the Observer of 3 July 1994. ‘What happens now, if you drag out the old movies and look again at even their most violent violence?’ It all seems ‘tame,’ not least because, ‘in the interim, you have yawned and blinked your way through a 30-year Passchendaele of slaughter You have become, in other words, irreversibly desensitised.’.
