As a cultural movement, the Italian Renaissance affected only a small part of the population. Italy was the most urbanized region of Europe, but three quarters of the people were still rural peasants. For this section of the population, life remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages.
Although I enjoyed the book, The Hellbound Heart, the movie version, Hellraiser - with the awesomely cheesy blue and yellow 80's FX - is a bit better and mainly because it was more fully realized.
Then came screenplays: he wrote several fine movies about the military starting in the early 1930s, including Dirigible (1931), The Citadel (1938), Dive Bomber (1941), Ceiling Zero (1936, based on his hit play) and Hell Divers (1931), a clip of which is shown in The Wings of Eagles.