Two weeks ago, I shared a quiz inspired by my suspicion that 21st-century moviegoers are not nearly familiar enough with the great films of the last century. It was meant to tease and challenge, but mostly to recommend additions to one’s watchlist. Answers are in bold below—how many did you get right?
1) A headline in one of Preston Sturges’s films reads: “MUSSOLINI RESIGNS: ‘Enough Is Sufficiency,’ Screams Il Duce.” Name this very funny 1943 film and the event that brings Mussolini to a boil.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943). The miracle—which provokes Mussolini’s ire—is that the heroine gives birth to sextuplets. (Bonus answer: The other miracle is that a man who knows he is not the father is happy to marry her.)
2) Which beloved movie features a spontaneous group singing of “La Marseillaise,” ends at an airfield, and has the word “beginning” in its last line of dialogue?
Casablanca (1942). Rick (Humphrey Bogart) has said goodbye to Ilse (Ingrid Bergman), who boards a plane with her Resistance-hero husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henredi). It is an act of generosity seemingly at odds with Rick’s reputation as a cynic. He and Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains), the Vichy inspector, walk off together into the mist, and Rick says, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Earlier, Lazlo had led the people at Rick’s café to burst into “La Marseillaise” and drown out the German soldiers singing a German patriotic song.
3) A Billy Wilder movie ends with a card game for two in which the male player proclaims his adoration of Miss Kubelik, who replies, “Shut up and deal.” Name the movie and the actors in the scene.
The Apartment (1960). Shirley MacLaine, the elevator operator, and Jack Lemmon, the corporate underling, have overcome the obstacles in their path and are playing a sexy game of cards on New Year’s Eve.
4) In a Hitchcock movie set in Santa Rosa, California, a man hectors his niece: “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?” Name the movie and the actors playing uncle and niece.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Both the villain and his niece—played by Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright—are named Charlie. They are close until she discovers that he is the “Merry Widow murderer.” A jaded Uncle Charlie tries to wise her up, to no avail.
5) Martha enters the house she and her husband live in and says, with disgust, “What. A. Dump.” What movie, who directed it, who plays Martha, and who plays her husband, George?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Mike Nichols’s directing debut. Twice married in real life—once before filming this movie, once after—Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton give a very convincing performance of a bickering couple.
6) Which of Stanley Kubrick’s movies ends with a four-letter word that arguably articulates the movie’s meaning? (Hint: Shostakovich.)
Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The plot has a lot to do with desire—as opposed to conjugal love—and the fantastic forms it may take. Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story, the movie takes us—through the eyes of Tom Cruise’s protagonist—to a full-dress masquerade in which the masked devotees observe rituals that are erotic, sadomasochistic, and threatening rather than religious. The movie’s last word is spoken by Nicole Kidman, who plays the wife of Cruise’s character.
7) Two Allied soldiers bury a third at a Japanese POW camp in 1943. One of them says the dead man gave his life “for the greater glory of …” He stops, pauses, and asks, “What did he die for?” Name the actor who says this, the movie, the director, and the last words spoken in it.
William Holden is the actor, David Lean the director; the movie is The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and the funerary scene, which occurs early in the film, brings tears to my eyes. Together with the last words spoken in the movie (“Madness! Madness!”) the question may be said to articulate the film’s deepest meaning.
8) Mimes play tennis with an invisible ball at the end of what memorable 1960s movie? What is the occupation of the film’s protagonist, and in what city does the movie take place? (Hint: In the background in one scene early in the movie, you hear the Lovin’ Spoonful sing “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”)
Blow-Up (1966). In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language film, set in London, the photographer played by David Hemming isn’t sure of what he should do when, upon blowing up a photograph he has taken of a couple in the park, he discovers a man with a gun in the bushes and knows a murder has taken place. A clue to his wavering belief in reality is the invisible ball that he tosses back to the mimes on the tennis court.
9) In which 1950 movie does a fabled Broadway actress command all and sundry to “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night”? Who plays the actress, who plays her husband, and what was their relationship off the screen?
All About Eve is the great backstage movie in which the fabled actress (Bette Davis) is surpassed by the scheming, meek-seeming understudy (Anne Baxter), helped along by the shady theater agent played by George Sanders. Gary Merrill, who was married to Bette Davis at the time, plays her husband. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed.
10) The popular 1941 song “Tangerine” is background music in two Barbara Stanwyck movies. In one of them she is involved with Fred MacMurray; in the other, Burt Lancaster. Name the movies.
The two films are Double Indemnity (1944) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). In the former (which I wrote about in more detail here), “Tangerine” plays when the adulterous lovers Phyllis (Stanwyck) and Walter (MacMurray) have their final showdown, while we hear the opening of Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony when Walter and Phyllis’s stepdaughter walk in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl.
Meanwhile, originally a radio show, Sorry, Wrong Number is a cinematic ode to the telephone. Leona Stevenson, the neurotic heiress played by Barbara Stanwyck, is both an invalid and an albatross around her husband’s neck. Is he out to get her? She overhears a threatening telephone conversation that makes her think he must be. Imagine being a hysterical hypochondriac, and your husband’s associate in criminal fraud has given you a number—it’s where you can reach him after a certain hour. You dial the number, and the party on the other end identifies himself as “city morgue.”
In the car scene in Sorry, Wrong Number, Leona sits listening to the happy-go-lucky strains of “Tangerine” on the radio until her husband (Burt Lancaster) enters the car and the radio abruptly shifts to a dark brooding passage from the second movement of Schubert’s Unfinished. The music is almost surely an homage to Stanwyck herself and Billy Wilder, who directed Double Indemnity.
