The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

It is particularly ironic that Reiner met such a horrible end, stabbed to death in his own home, because the vast majority of the films that he made, especially earlier in his career, were infused with a sense of all-American joyfulness and hope that made him, for a while, a filmmaker talked off in the same breath as Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg. Son of Hollywood royalty Carl Reiner, he began his career as an actor, most notably in the role of Meathead in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. It made him a household name, but also contributed to a sense of Reiner as a dumb, good-natured left-winger: he once remarked that “I could win the Nobel Prize and........

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