A Movie Scene Quiz

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Thanks Mac.

Now back to square one on Bree's question.

Lord Love a Duck (Tuesday Weld) + Jules et Jim (Jeanne Moreau)

Speaking of weeks going by! Hi, gang!

I really enjoyed the new Batman--much better than prior incarnations, of course one always mourns the lack of Michael Gough as Alfred.

I couldn't face War of the Worlds, I'm finding Tom Cruise too scary on his own these days even though a good friend of mine worked on the film at Industrial Light & Magic in post-production!

Ahhh, Tuesday Weld. I always remember the hilarious bits that were written into MAD Magazine in the 60's by Sergio Arragones called "Marginal Humor." The one regarding Tuesday was, "If Tuesday Weld, married Hal March the 3rd, she'd be Tuesday March the 3rd." I can't see or read her name without thinking of that and laughing!!

Well, a show of my photos opens tomorrow so I've been busy as can be. It's hard because it isn't a craft show, it's in a small fun community gallery. But they keep wanting to refer to me as an "Artist", and that's really hard for me! I'm just getting comfortable with "Photographer!" I'll let you know how it goes!

I'm with you, mac--this version is a bit tough. I stand back and watch the masters at work!

Raggedy, you're correct about Lord Jim.

mac, I liked Broken Flowers too -- maybe not as much as Lost in Translation, but it was still fun. Did you notice that, in the credits, "Kid in car" was played by Homer Murray, who I think is Bill Murray's son? (You'll know what scene the kid in the car was in, I'm sure -- I'll say no more, for our friends who haven't seen the movie yet.)

lois, don't be shy -- post the link to the website which has your photos on it. If you don't, I will!

Bravo, Loislane. Yes, please post the web site. We'd love to see it.

How great about your show, Lois!

Thanks for pointing out about Homer, bree. I had not caught the name at the time - though I stayed for the credits of course. Bill Murray's bio at IMDb says he has a son named Homer born in 1982 which sounds about right for the age of that significant (?) kid in the car.

Bill Murray is from the Chicago area. He chose the name "Homer" for his son in connection with how that word is used in baseball. Bill is a big baseball fan and is part owner of a minor league baseball team.

Interesting, wandeljw. So I guess it doesn't mean he's a classical scholar!

Good morning!

wandeljw: That's interesting.

bree: That's funny.


New question:

Paul Newman (2) + Mia Farrow (1)

This combination might be easier on the pallette: :wink:

(The) Bruce Willis (1) + Gregory Peck (1)

The Color of Money (Newman) + The Purple Rose of Cairo (Farrow)

or

(The) Color of Night (Willis) + The Purple Plain (Peck)

The Color Purple is correct.

Do you have a question, bree?

New question:

Mae Busch (1) + Robert Vaughn (1)

I need a clue, please. I worked very hard for the requested clue.

All I can come up with are:

Motel Blue (Vaughn) + Sons of the Desert (Busch) (and I don't believe it was a novel)

and An American Affair (Vaughn) + The Beauty Shoppers (and that was a play, if I'm not mistaken)

I can see you're having the dickens of a time with this question, so here's a well-deserved clue:

The title of the Mae Busch movie includes the first name of one of her co-stars in the movie. The first name also happens to be the title word I'm looking for.

By the way, in both your guesses, you put the Robert Vaughn movie before the Mae Busch movie. In my question, the Busch movie comes first. I don't know if you misread the question, or if you did it that way out of desperation, but the question will be easier to answer if you don't contort it out of shape.

Well, now that you've given me the answer, I actually feel guilty about posting it.

And what can I say about reversing the actors?

A thunderstorm (rained right into my bedroom through a new window) - a power outage for over an hour -

lame excuses?

Maybe just a jambled brain.

Anyway:

Oliver the Eighth (Mae Busch (Oliver Hardy) + Transylvania Twist (Robert Vaughn)

Nothing to be guilty about -- I've needed a lot more help than that on plenty of previous questions!

Oliver Twist is correct, of course. What made me think of it was a New York Times article about a new movie version, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Ben Kingsley as Fagin, that's opening next month. Could be interesting.

That's terrible about the rain coming in through your new window. Now, the person who should be feeling guilty is whoever installed that window!

Well, there's a long story associated with the window and roof and gutters, (which I'm getting estimates on), but there is no gutter over that window, so I will be in touch with the installer tomorrow.

I saw Oliver Twist, directed by David Lean, with Alec Guinness as Fagin and Anthony Newley as the Artful Dodger. Robert Newton played Bill Sikes. An excellent production. It shows up on TV every now and then.
I'd be interested in seeing Kingsley in it.

New question. (No tie-in that I'm aware of.)

Ray Milland (1) + Dorothy Lamour (1)

Here's the article. You can read it (if you're interested) while I'm working on your question.

A Face Lift for Wretched Old Fagin

By MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS

Toward the end of Roman Polanski's "Oliver Twist," set for release next month, Oliver pays a visit to the imprisoned villain Fagin. He comes not to offer a righteous gesture of forgiveness, as in the Dickens novel, but simply to thank him. "You were kind to me," the boy says.

The departure is a tribute to a character who - as reinvented by Mr. Polanski and his screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, and played by Sir Ben Kingsley - delivers the movie's central moral lesson. "You know what I consider the greatest sin in the world, my dear?" Fagin says at a key moment. "Ingratitude."

And with such change comes a redemption that has been almost 170 years in the making.

Born in 1837, Dickens's Fagin was larded with ethnic stereotypes from his first appearance as "a very old, shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair." The author also described him as a figure of fun who protects and cares for Oliver, although this "merry old Gentleman" (a traditional name for Satan) finally proves to be a Judas, conspiring to corrupt the orphan.

Through more than 20 movie and television versions, not to mention a stage musical, Fagin usually remained a bit less than human. Alec Guinness, in David Lean's 1948 version, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose. The look was modeled on George Cruikshank's illustrations for the novel's first edition, but it also resembled anti-Semitic caricatures in Der Stürmer, the weekly newspaper that had been published by Julius Streicher in Nazi Germany.

At a theater in Berlin the audience was so offended by Fagin's characterization that it rioted; the protests ended only when the theater manager promised to withdraw the film. In the United States, objections by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the New York Board of Rabbis prevented the film's release here until 1951, after seven minutes of profile shots and other offending scenes were cut.

In 1960, for the London stage premiere of Lionel Bart's musical "Oliver!," the actor Ron Moody drew milder but similar criticism. His Fagin had a stereotypical nasal inflection and chanted songs in the style of Jewish folk music, mannerisms that were toned down or dropped in Carol Reed's 1968 film version. Instead, he played with gay stereotypes, mincing his way through "Pick a Pocket or Two," and twirling a frilly pink parasol in "I'd Do Anything."

If Mr. Polanski and company have finally put such cartoons to rest, it was more by instinct than conscious choice. "We've lived long enough to know that certain things should be done for certain reasons. Without analyzing it. Which would be embarrassing, you know?" said Mr. Polanski, who is 72, in a recent telephone interview.

"There is no completely bad man," he added. "Fagin, with all his villainy, is still giving the children some kind of home, you know. What was happening to these kids in the street was just unbearable."

THE current Fagin first took shape on Mr. Polanski's sketch pad, the director explained. He drew Fagin's face, costume, and makeup; he also collected tape recordings of Jewish cockney for Sir Ben to study.

The actor, who did not recall seeing the sketches, said of the tapes: "He may have passed them on to an assistant, but I never listened to them. I grow from the inside out. I said to Roman, 'I met this man, I met him when I was Oliver's age.' "

Sir Ben's model for Fagin was the proprietor of a junk shop in Manchester, England, in a neighborhood called the Shambles on a street called Withey Grove. "I used to stare up at this man who had teeth like a horse, a very, very grimy face, and he wore an old coat, on top of an old coat, on top of an old coat, on top of heaven knows what, and it was tied 'round the waist with rope."

Sir Ben recalled that when his little brother asked the shopkeeper for a Penny Black, one of philately's rarest treasures, the man softly crowed, in a voice that sounded like Fagin's: "Ohhhh, yer askin' for the moooon! Yer askin' for the moon!"

Other visual inspirations had been acquired when Sir Ben was in Krakow for the filming of "Schindler's List." There he purchased a stack of sepia photographs of Jews taken in the late 1800's and early 1900's, which he gave to the makeup and costume designers on "Oliver Twist." He also gave them 19th-century engravings of Sir Edmund Kean in the role of Shylock in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," a performance that Sir Ben called "the first naturalistic and non-anti-Semitic Shylock ever onstage."

And he created a personal history for the character, inspired by what he called Fagin's "warped but empathetic stance with Oliver," the parentless waif whom he both protects and uses.

In creating this backstory, Sir Ben also made a connection to Mr. Polanski, whose parents were deported from Krakow's Jewish ghetto to Nazi concentration camps when he was a boy. "Fagin was brought up by his grandparents, who did not speak a word of English, who brought him to London as a child, and he had to fend for himself," he posited. "Fagin had many near-death experiences, as Roman did in the ghettos when they were occupied. Roman nearly died many times as a child. There is that familiarity."

Mr. Harwood also drew a parallel to Mr. Polanski's life, albeit one different from Sir Ben's.

"My own theory is that Roman thinks of himself as Oliver Twist," Mr. Harwood said. "Oliver comes into this world, is abandoned. That's Roman, abandoned not by the agency of his parents, but by the historical world he came into - the tidal wave that was moving against him - and he's swept along. And he escapes the ghetto and goes to these people and they look after him, and gets into a film school. These various adventures. His life is picaresque."

Mr. Polanski explained his interest in "Oliver Twist" more simply. His wife, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner, "knowing that I was looking for something that my kids could somehow identify with, said, 'Why don't you do that 'Oliver,' since you like it so much?' " He at first thought the film version of the musical, released by Columbia in 1968, remained too fresh a presence to permit another telling. But "when I realized that it was a 40-year-old movie, I said, 'Yes, that's it!' "

Softening the edges around Fagin wasn't the only change worked into the current version by Mr. Polanski and Mr. Harwood, previous collaborators on "The Pianist." They deliberately stripped the story of its Dickensian element of coincidence, Mr. Polanski said, "to make it acceptable to today's audience."

That meant eliminating such antique touches as the revelation that Mr. Brownlow, the rich man who becomes Oliver's benefactor in the novel, was the former fiancé of the orphan's dead aunt. Also diminished was Dickens's underlying agenda: a plea against the Poor Laws and child labor. "That argument enters into the equation of fiction and prevents the real judgment of character," Mr. Harwood said.

After shooting the film last year, Mr. Polanski and Mr. Harwood watched Lean's version of "Oliver Twist" together. Mr. Harwood found Guinness's Jewish stereotypes "obnoxious and grotesque."

Mr. Polanski called the film "a very poor adaptation." He added: "Showing Fagin the way David Lean did doesn't make any sense, as a total caricature of the villain."

Sir Ben said that he has never seen "Oliver!" and has not seen Lean's version since childhood. He said that his portrayal of Fagin was in no way a response to the Guinness interpretation; and he said he was unaware of the controversy that surrounded his predecessor's portrayal of Fagin.

However, he said: "I think we have to destroy the stereotypes and replace them with archetypes. As an actor, my struggle is to put archetypes on the screen in the mythological sense. My struggle with Fagin was to present the Collapsed Father."

Asked to describe what he meant by Collapsed Father, Sir Ben protested, "I can't."

He elaborated: "I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing, what I'm trying to do, what I want you to feel, how I judge him. Here is a portrait. Here is a portrait of a Jew. Make of it what you will."