In homage to the sublime picture-blog known as If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats —
Some dead guy in THE DECEIVERS, a Merchant-Ivory production about the Thugee sect, directed by Nicholas Meyer.
(Pierce Brosnan, a British office of the Raj, goes undercover in blackface to expose the murderous Thugs. He’s supposed to speak five dialects like a native, but since the whole film is in English, all we get is a slight “My-goodness-gracious-me” accent. It’s a startling true story made less startling and less true by nearly every script decision in it.)
And this is Flying Office Trubshawe, played by Robert Coote, in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
Trubshawe was apparently Powell & Pressburger’s lucky name: David Niven has a servant (Robert Griffiths) with that surname in THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL. Similarly, Billy Wilder’s lucky name was Sheldrake — it appears in SUNSET BLVD, THE APARTMENT, KISS ME STUPID, and I think in ACE IN THE HOLE somebody mentions a Sheldrake.
When I make my first feature film I’ll be sure to have a Sheldrake AND a Trubshawe.
Any other filmmakers we know of with lucky character names?
shadowplay 