My friend Travis had been to New York long before me. I asked about the worryingly high curbs. I knew the average curb in America wasn’t that high, from movies I’d seen. But I knew that Gene Kelly had jumped on an off a curb in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN that looked like a White Cliff of Dover transported to the MGM lot, and Jimmy Cagney staggered along in the shadow of a curb he can barely see over.
No, there are no curbs like that, I was told.
So how could they get away with showing the American public things the public knew didn’t exist? And why try? Either there were, in those long-ago days, mountainous, leg-breaking curbs, maybe to keep the Indians out (most Indians are not real tall), or it was some kind of deliberate artistic artifice, along the lines of “Everything on the screen should be bigger than in real life?”
