His Girl Friday

Walter: There's been a lamp burning in the window for ya, honey.

Hildy: Oh, I jumped out that window a long time ago.

Periodically, I'll be recapping some of our memorable past experiences. I can't always promise to remember the food or recipes, but something about these movies stood out.

Host: Chanda

Date: July 22, 2010

Dinner: This awesome spaghetti with a sauce composed mostly of stealth vegetables.

Oh good golly Miss Molly I love "His Girl Friday." This was high on my list of movies that I love too much to show at Movie Night. The spectacular rat-a-tat dialogue, jokes zinging past you almost too fast to catch - this is a challenging movie to show to a bunch of hecklers.

But when Chanda hosted, she said we were going to choose from the list of Watch It Now options from Netflix that she had queued up, and "His Girl Friday" was clearly the most superior. I issued a heartfelt and stern caveat that we could only watch it if we promised not to talk too much. This truly worried me, you guys. Luckily, there were only four of us that night, so silence was easier to enforce. And it worked - laughter in all the right places, close attention to the plot, the works.

We did encounter one of the inherent problems of streaming movies online - in the middle of the farcical, extended denouement in the press room, the movie kept stopping to rebuffer, so those last 15 madcap minutes were frustratingly drawn out. But - bright side - it gave us time to talk.

Hey It's That Guy Moments

This movie had two That Guys who just drove me mad. They were two important supporting characters, and I just couldn't place them. Had to give up on one of them and turn to IMDB.

Earl Williams in "His Girl Friday," played by John Qualen

John Qualen at far right in "Casablanca" as Berger

The killer (Earl Williams) = Berger from Casablanca

It's his mousy, mewling voice and the lips - something about the lips struck me as important. Finally, I put it together: I kept seeing the lips jut out to reach a drink, and it led me to his scene at the bar in Casablanca talking to Victor Lazlo.

The sherrif = the judge in Miracle on 34th Street

This one drove me bonkers. I kept picturing this guy making a silly singsong voice with a kid, but I absolutely could not place him. Chanda pulled up his profile on IMDB, but his name (Gene Lockhart) wasn't enough of a trigger. She read through all his credits - and cripes there were a lot of them - until she hit "Miracle on 34th Street" and I shouted "YES." Such catharsis in connecting the dots. The singsongy voice I heard was the judge announcing "over-ru-uled."

Ralph Bellamy, far right, in "His Girl Friday"

Ralph Bellamy, left, in "Trading Places"

Ralph Bellamy = old guy in Pretty Woman and Trading Places

Most of us know Ralph Bellamy from "Pretty Woman" and "Trading Places," but he was a great 40s movie star. Enough so that they dropped his name in the screenplay of "Friday":

Walter (describing Bruce): He looks like that fellow in the movies, Ralph Bellamy.

Seriously, how meta is that? It's easy to think that's a post-modern, too-ironic-for-you thing that current movies do (like in "Oceans 12" when they pretend Tess - played by Julia Roberts - is actually Julia Roberts), but clearly Howard Hawkes had them beat.

Fun trivia

Cary Grant's real name was Archibald Leach, and he tried to work that name into the screenplay of many of his movies. Not 10 minutes after I announced this bit of trivia, we heard the iconic line: "The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach."

The food

Amy couldn't make it at the last minute, and she was scheduled to bring dessert. So an hour before I left, I baked a quick batch of brownies. Rich showed up as my awesome carpool to the Northland, and he's brought ice cream and berries. We get to Chanda's, and Kandy as supplied a dessert as well.

The lesson: Do not deprive us of our dessert break.