I couldn’t sleep last night, so I stayed up late, watching old movies as I sorted through piles of dusty paperwork. The first person to name all three films I watched wins a November 3, 2014 issue of the National Enquirer, which, if memory serves, I picked up on the way to the 20th meeting of my one-day-a-year band, The Monkey Power Trio. [Screen grabs from all three movies can be seen above.] I thought, if I got desperate for lyric ideas, I could always open it up and find some inspiration. Thankfully, though, I don’t think I had to resort to that. At least, I don’t recall singing any songs about “OJ’s Dying Confession” or “Hollywood Boobs”. [In retrospect, Hollywood Boobs would have been a really great song title.] But maybe you’ll find inspiration in it, even if I didn’t. All you have to do is name the three films shown above… If you get them all right, I’ll leave this issue of the Enquirer outside somewhere, and tell you were you can find find it. [I’m too cheap to pay for postage.]
update: The first shot is from 1971’s made-for-tv film Duel, starring Dennis Weaver. [It’s most notable for being Stephen Spielberg’s first feature-length film — the film that essentially got his Hollywood career off the ground.] The second shot is from the 1942 film This Gun for Hire, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. [Ladd portrays a hit man who eventually does the right thing and helps the authorities uncover a plot on behalf of a wealthy American industrialist to sell chemical weapons to the Japanese. Lake, a singer/magician apparently convinces him to do the right thing by showing him kindness after he robs and attempts to murder her.] The third is from 1948’s The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. [Laughton, a powerful, clock-obsessed publisher, beats his girlfriend to death with a sundial stolen from a bar run by a man who claims to have anything you could possibly ask for. I suspect this was the inspiration for Let’s Make a Deal.] As no one guessed all three, I will be keeping the National Enquirer for myself.
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As I need to know more about “Hollywood Boobs” I’ll take a crack at this.
Movie #1: A Turkish remake of Smokey and the Bandit. I looked it up and the translation of “Smokey and the Bandit” into Turkish is Dumanlı ve eşkiya.
Movie #2: Let me research this one a little. I reserve the right to come back.
Movie #3: Something with Charles Laughton. I will come back to this one also.
When you put “Dumanlı ve eşkiya” back into Google Translate, it comes back as “Smoky and Thug” in English.
Number three, as it turns out was easy. I searched “Charles Laughton mustaches” and it came back with dozens of variations. This one was tied to a movie called The Big Clock.
The second movie is proving to be more difficult that the other other two.
I thought of Duel with Dennis Hopper immediately when I saw pic #1, but that’s based on fuzzy memory and no Googling or IMDBing, so just a guess. No clue about the others.
The first movie was Duel, and the third was The Big Clock. I’m not sure how this works… Should you each get a part of the National Enquirer, or shall I wait and give the whole thing to whomever gets the second movie?
And next year’s Monkey Power record, I predict, will contain songs titled both “Smoky and Thug” and “Hollywood Boobs”.
Oh, I also discovered this weekend that Parker Brothers came out with a Duel-themed board game after the movie came out. I wonder if there were other ABC movie-of-the-week board games.
Surely someone in Chinese intelligence can identify the two people in the middle photo. I think all they need to make a positive identification now is a clear shot of an earlobe.
Well, I disqualify myself because I said Dennis Hopper was, and it just popped in my head that the lead was was Dennis Weaver not Hopper. Duh. I guess I was just too frightened to look it up, because that was one scary movie (at least in my memory).
The first shot is from 1971’s made-for-tv film Duel, starring Dennis Weaver. [It’s most notable for being Stephen Spielberg’s first feature-length film — the film that essentially got his Hollywood career off the ground.] The second shot is from the 1942 film This Gun for Hire, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. [Ladd portrays a hit man who eventually does the right thing and helps the authorities uncover a plot on behalf of a wealthy American industrialist to sell chemical weapons to the Japanese. Lake, a singer/magician apparently convinces him to do the right thing by showing him kindness after he robs and attempts to murder her.] The third is from 1948’s The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. [Laughton, a powerful, clock-obsessed publisher, beats his girlfriend to death with a sundial stolen from a bar run by a man who claims to have anything you could possibly ask for. I suspect this was the inspiration for Let’s Make a Deal.] As no one guessed all three, I will be keeping the National Enquirer for myself.