Rayon is pretty flammable.
Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters died in 1871. Wikipedia says that rayon wasn’t used for fabrics until 1899.
One of the episodes of “Death in Paradise” that we watched last night had a male character jump up on a desk when a cooler full of crabs got loose in the police station. That episode is within the last four or five years.
There also was/is “flannelette”, a cloth made from cotton that acquired a reputation for dangerous flammability. Crinoline, The Fatal Victorian Fashion Trend That Killed Thousands As those familiar with fire starting may know, the thinner a fiber is the more easily it catches fire and the faster it burns. So while ordinary cotton cloth made from spun thread may be only mediumly flammable, cotton or cellulose processed to extremely fine fuzziness becomes significantly more of a “flash” hazard. The ability of industrial textile processing to mass produce such fine flannels, felts, velours and velvets spurred the development of ways to treat cloth to be more resistant to being ignited.
Isn’t that what they use to clean guns?
Robert Wagner and Dana Wynter were roughly the same age; Terri Garr was 14 years younger than Wagner. Personally, that’s a little too much of an age difference for me. It feels like Captain Kirk getting hot for Miri.
A slightly different version of that was pretty common where and when I grew up . Part of the family ( usually mom and kids) lived in the house while the rest of the family (usually dad) lived in the basement. We called it an Irish or Catholic divorce. I can think of four families off-hand where it went on for years, even decades.
Teri Garr was 24 in 1968. That’s plenty old enough to have an adult relationship.
Practically an old maid by 1960s standards.
Certainly old enough to choose her own partners.
A couple to do with smoking, mainly because even in period stuff people rarely smoke (though post Mad-Men it seems to be making a realistic comeback)
Bad guy (often with a pack tucked under a sleeve of his t-shirt) / Tough girl - just a quick way to establish a character
Self-destructive - Don Draper (Mad Men), Patrick Batemen (American Psycho). Almost same kinda thing as above
Impending doom: In the Godfather and Soprano’s often lighting up was a bad omen.
Three on a match (military). A sniper sees the first light up, maybe marks the 2nd guy and not good for the 3rd guy. It’s kind of a superstition with a degree of reality: don’t give your position to a sniper. Perhaps best known in “All quiet on the western front” yet at least gets common mention (Band of Brothers I recall them talking about it)
And not really related to smoking, but a character’s “cough of impending death” signalling they are doomed and only because I’ve not seen it done in years
Which reminds me: Any time a woman throws up, it almost certainly signals that she’s pregnant. We know it, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. I’m not sure whether it’s a “dead” one, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in anything new in a while.
Because that indicated that they had tuberculosis (which used to be called consumption)
Nearly dead trope because tuberculosis is rare nowadays.
Now they just get Hollywood disease, which causes them to become more beautiful and ethereal until they die.
And The Best Years of Our Lives.
And Mad Men (in the episode “Red in the Face”). A drunk Roger Sterling wrecks the Drapers’ anniversary with war stories, claiming that the three-on-a-match tale was spread by the ad industry to sell matches.
Corollary: A middle-aged man at a dinner table saying “It’s nothing, just a little indigestion” and then dying of a heart attack before dessert is served.
At least during the Great War, who the f- would be showing themselves above the parapet?
One I don’t see anymore in fiction (or real life for that matter) is the idea that cooking is somehow unmanly or that men are automatically bad at cooking.
Saki was killed by a sniper. His last words supposedly were “ Put that bloody cigarette out! (dubious that he’d split the infinitive like that). But if one were close enough to a lit match that was enough to invite death
I think Jack Lemmon put that idea to bed in The Apartment.
Okay, Wiki says he was sheltering in a shell crater i.e. somewhere out in No-Man’s Land. Definitely not the best place to make oneself conspicuous.