Double Visions of Blues and Bard

More than a decade ago, when I was a senior editor at The American Conservative, I occasionally wrote a piece that paired two films and discussed their relationship, something I called my Double Feature Feature. I didn’t pair them to demonstrate the influence of one film upon the other; in most cases, there was no plausible influence. Rather, I was interested in how the pairing might illuminate the way a common theme may develop differently in films by different directors, or how it might reveal the extent of cultural change between an older film and a newer one.