{"id":14378,"date":"2011-06-19T13:57:27","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T18:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=14378"},"modified":"2016-09-02T17:38:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T22:38:27","slug":"pikes-peek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2011\/06\/19\/pikes-peek\/","title":{"rendered":"Pike’s peek"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Lady Eve.<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Hollywood is supposedly making movies for mass audiences, and up to a point that\u2019s true. But there\u2019s an in-group aspect of Hollywood as well. There are moments in the movies when the writers and directors and actors seem to be talking more among themselves than to outsiders. We\u2019re probably more familiar with this nowadays, as when Tarantino and Soderbergh cast Michael Keaton as the same character in both\u00a0Jackie Brown<\/em> and Out of Sight<\/em>. Not only does the gesture\u00a0suggest solidarity between two directors of roughly the same generation. I think it’s also a sign that the directors\u00a0respect Elmore Leonard\u2019s concern to let a character from one novel pop up in another.<\/p>\n

You see the same attitude in those in-jokes we occasionally find in Hollywood movies. The most famous, I suppose, is Cary Grant\u2019s warning, in His Girl Friday<\/em>, that the last man who thought he’d beaten him was Archie Leach, \u201cjust a week before he cut his throat.\u201d Archie Leach was of course Grant\u2019s real name. In the same film, Grant as Walter Burns tells the platinum blonde Angie to seduce Bruce Baldwin. How will she know him? He looks like that fella in the movies, he says, \u201cYou know, Ralph Bellamy.\u201d Angie replies with simple lack of interest, \u201cOh, him?\u201d Since Bruce is played by Bellamy, this is a little cruel; both character and actor are treated as losers.<\/p>\n

Preston Sturges liked such playfulness, as when in The Lady Eve<\/em> (1941) he used his birthday as the date on a check. In the same movie, the protagonist reads a book called Are Snakes Necessary?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No such book exists, more’s the pity. The title pays comic reference to James Thurber\u2019s 1929 best-selling satire on marriage manuals, Is Sex Necessary?<\/em> and confirms the snake-as-phallus imagery that isn\u2019t exactly underplayed in the rest of the film. Sturges revisited the gag phrase when he proposed Is Marriage Necessary?<\/em> as the title for a later picture. Unsurprisingly, it didn\u2019t pass the censor, and instead we got a more anodyne title,\u00a0The Palm Beach Story<\/em> (1942).<\/p>\n

These are comedies, though. On Saturday night, I saw an instance of in-group crosstalk where I hadn\u2019t expected it. The Long Night<\/em> (1947) is Anatol Litvak\u2019s somber remake of Le Jour se l\u00e8ve<\/em>. Unlike Hawks and Sturges, Litvak wasn\u2019t exactly known for cockeyed humor, nor was screenwriter John Wexley (The Roaring Twenties<\/em>, City for Conquest<\/em>, Hangmen Also Die!<\/em>). Yet in one shot, there it was, a citation as plain as a pikestaff.<\/p>\n

Over several years I\u2019ve been gathering material for a blog or web essay on product placement. (I\u2019m mostly in favor of it.) So I tend to scrounge around among hand props and other bits of flotsam in the frame, hoping to catch a brand name. Usually this task-driven visual search<\/a> comes to naught, but The Long Night<\/em> paid me back.<\/p>\n

In Sturges\u2019 The Lady Eve<\/em>, you\u2019ll remember, Henry Fonda plays Charles Poncefort Pike, heir to the vast fortune of the Pike brewery. The firm\u2019s success rests upon Pike\u2019s Pale Ale. A flyer for the product convinces Jean and her father that Charles should be the target of their next con job.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pike\u2019s Pale and its tagline run through the movie as a comic motif. But no such product then existed. It features on a list of fake movie products in a 2006 <\/a>New York Times<\/a><\/em> story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All the more surprising, then, is a scene in The Long Night<\/em> six years later. The rapacious magician Maximilian (Vincent Price) takes Joanne (Barbara Bel Geddes) to a symphony concert. She reads the program avidly, and on the back we can glimpse a familiar brand.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The advertisement even features the same text and layout as the flyer in Sturges\u2019 film.<\/p>\n

If it’s an in-joke \u00e0 la His Girl Friday<\/em>, what’s the punchline? And how did it even get there? We have two different studios (Paramount, RKO) and different genres (satiric romantic comedy, gloomy romantic drama). Was the ad just lying around a props warehouse? Did Fonda, who plays the hero of The Long Night<\/em>, keep the flyer as a souvenir of The Lady Eve<\/em> and ask the producers to include it as a shout-out to Sturges? Was there a company specializing in making printed props for the studios and here it just recycled something it had done for Paramount? Or is it just a case of Hollywood gratuitously referencing itself?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be eager to hear from anybody who knows or has an educated guess. In the meantime, I\u2019ll keep scanning frames, and being diverted by the ways that the Hollywood In-Crowd creates a world of off-center echoes and cross-references. It’s as if movies fertilized each other, but promiscuously, creating an eccentric world behind the screen, where stray images and lines of dialogue jostle against one another. Of one thing we can be sure: It will be unpredictable.<\/p>\n

\n

Today there is a real Pike’s Pale Ale. The proprietors of Seattle’s Pike Brewing company<\/a> didn’t know about\u00a0The Lady Eve<\/em> when they conjured up their brew.\u00a0I’ve never tasted it, but you might count this a case of blog product placement. Mmmmm, pale ale….<\/p>\n

Ian Patrick displays an imaginative gouache called \u201cAre Snakes Necessary?\u201d here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, The Long Night <\/em>is another of those 1940s movies with a flashback within a flashback, of the sort I considered in an earlier post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I top and tail the entry with pictures of Slim because he looks swell when he’s thinking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Long Night.<\/em><\/p>\n

PS 19 June: <\/strong>Rapid Response Dept:\u00a0Alert reader Sean Weitner<\/strong> points out the reappearance of the same newspaper page in a bevy of TV shows. The evidence is here<\/a>. Thanks to Sean!<\/p>\n

PPS 21 June: <\/strong>More bulletins from alert readers. Leo Rubinkowski <\/strong>points out the source of the recurring newspage on <\/a>Slate<\/a><\/em> here<\/a>. This wouldn’t, I think, explain the reappearance of Pike’s Pale, but maybe….\u00a0Andrea Comiskey <\/strong>has found that Douglas Sirk was apparently fond of certain foil-etched items. The films are All That Heaven Allows<\/em> and Written on the Wind<\/em>, and the pix are here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a>. Leo and Andrea are UW grad students, so I’m especially happy to thank them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lady Eve. DB here: Hollywood is supposedly making movies for mass audiences, and up to a point that\u2019s true. But there\u2019s an in-group aspect of Hollywood as well. There are moments in the movies when the writers and directors and actors seem to be talking more among themselves than to outsiders. We\u2019re probably more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,188,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s-hollywood","category-directors-sturges","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14378"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34676,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14378\/revisions\/34676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}