Muppet Movie

I’ve been to the Milan Film Festival twice. They’ve shown my short movie CRY FOR BOBO three times. This year they asked previous contributors to make little movies about their Milanese adventures. I didn’t have access to much in the way of production values (not even lights, as you can see), but I did have some old puppets I’d made, so I thought I’d use one. The American accent just happened.

The September Shadowplay Impossible Film Quiz

Without any adequate warning at all! As always, amusing answers are just as welcome as correct ones.

Hand-painted movie posters from Ghana are the way forward.

Round [One] Who said that? And where?

a) “Oh no, not for me, three men on a horse!”

b) “Well, I was dreaming I was awake, and then all of a sudden I woke up and found myself asleep!”

c) “Don’t you want to live in this beautiful nest? Have a personal maid? Wear diaphanous gowns? And eat regularly?”

d) “Some of the wildest men make the best pets.”

Round [Two] Role ‘em! (AKA The Bull Montana Round) What roles connect the following –

a) Gustav Von Seyffertitz; Laurence Olivier; Anthony Higgins.

b) Jeremy Swift; Harry Secombe; Francis L Sullivan.

c) Michael Caine; Warner Baxter; Dan O’Herlihy.

d) Colin Clive; William Hurt; Orson Welles.

Round [Three] Who played –

(a) a cop in 1973, a playwright in 1982, a salesman in 1992?

(b) a princess in 1931, a thief in 1932, a schoolteacher in1936?

(c) an interior designer in 1967, a priest in 1971, a pornographer/blackmailer in 1978?

(d) a detective in 1996, a media consultant in 1998, secretary of state in 2008?

Round [Four] “A guy comes in the door, you got nothing. He comes in the window, you got a situation.”

(a) A man is hosting a party but his sink is blocked. He calls a plumber, but the first person to arrive is an indigent writer looking for a hand-out. The second is a woman. What’s the film?

(b) A woman is murdering her neighbours and converting them into soap. Most of them are played by men in drag. What’s the film?

(c) A con artist tries to make money with an invention which supposedly converts sewage into rubber.

(d) A clown tries to prevent the forced marriage of the girl he loves by unleashing a circus lion.

Round [Five] Directors. What links ~

(a) Bob Swaim; GW Pabst; Jacques Feyder; John Brahm; Edgar Ulmer.

(b) William Wellman; Sergio Leone.

(c) Raoul Walsh; Allan Dwan; WS Van Dyke; Christy Cabanne.

(d) Ronald Neame; Charles Laughton; George Stevens.

Round [Six] Murdered by Dario Argento. Which films contain the following outrageous homicides?

(a) Elevator shaft plunge?

(b) Face dunted off sharp cornered furnishings after being frightened/charmed by laughing automaton?

(c) Savaged by own seeing-eye dog?

(d) Shot through spyhole?

Round [Seven] The non-diegetic sound round.

(a) What’s strange about Dan O’Herlihy’s barking dog?

(b) Where is Gene Wilder baffled by the sound of a sea gull?

(c) Why does the sound of an air hostess’s announcement spell death by spear?

(d) If Steve McQueen is playing with matchsticks, how come we hear the sound of the machine shop?

Round [Eight] Answer the following film titles –

a) WHO’S CARRY CRUMB?

b) HOW MUCH WOOD CAN A WOODCHUCK CHUCK?

c) WHO?

d) WHAT?

Round [Nine] Casting capers

a) What film finds room for the children of Vic Morrow, George C Scott, John Carradine, Keith Carradine, Jason Robards and Robert Benchley?

b) Where can you find Chris Isaak, Todd Solondz and Joan Cusack?

c) What movie embraces Jeff Goldblum, Glenda Jackson and Cris Campion ?

d) And, looking very closely, where will you find Jeff Goldblum, Sigourney Weaver and Beverley D’Angelo?

Bonus question:

Who? Where? What? Why?

The Sunday Intertitle: Flyboys

And shagged you. Gary Cooper berates Colleen Moore, having just kicked her up the arse, in LILAC TIME.

The movie, directed by George Fitzmaurice (with uncredited assist from Frank Lloyd) is clearly designed to cash in on Coop’s star-making turn in William Wellman’s WINGS. Although the Montana mule had been bumming around Hollywood for a few years, and even taken leading man roles, his single scene as a laconic flier in the Oscar-winning aviation/war epic gave him the Big Push needed to ascend to star status. So repeating the trick with Cooper as an airman opposite Colleen Moore was a cinch for box office success.

Moore, implausibly, is a French farmgirl, and Cooper, even more crazily, is some kind of English lord, a double feat of casting madness possible only in silent movies, where it works effortlessly. Moore seems to have really worked at it, producing a trickbag of amusing Gallic mannerisms.

While WINGS had pretensions to delivering an anti-war message, LT merely remarks upon the sadness of our boys getting shot down, while celebrating the identical occurrence when it happens to the other side. Moore is recipient of a bunch of trophies captured from defeated German pilots, which adds an unintended morbid side to her characterisation. It’s all very elegantly made and the leads are appealing and the aeroplane stunts appropriately hair-raising, but Moore is too childlike to provoke the sexiness Coop was capable of, and it lacks equally the homoerotic edge that WINGS had, despite Clara Bow’s best efforts to heteronormatize the prettyboy leads.

Wait, what?