I don’t think the thread is supposed to be limited to one movie. So, to continue on this topic, sorry you don’t like John Wayne, but his merits as an actor are not relevant. The role he was playing served a purpose to the story being told in the movie, and the movie would have been less good without that character.
Also his furious destruction of the gas station, heedless of the ineffectual efforts of the two attendants to stop him.
And Terry-Thomas’s rant: “Why, the whole bloody place is the most unspeakable matriarchy in the whole history of civilization! Look at yourself, and the way your wife and her strumpet of a mother push you through the hoop! As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated. They’re like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis, while their women sit under hairdryers, eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother’s Day! And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms! In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don’t you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I’ll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight!”
Thing is, that’s not just a happenstance collection or even a deliberate effort to star-stud the cast - many of these actors have appeared in other Wes Anderson films and likely will again. Anderson’s current project, The Isle of Dogs, features Abraham, Goldblum, Keitel, Norton and Swinton from your list, among others.
You’re partially right about that scene. It was written byWilliam Rose (an American expat who moved to the UK and did the screenplays for several successful Ealing comedies) and his British wife Tania Rose.
Incidentally, one thing I’ve picked up in later viewings of IAM⁴W is the number of film homages within it. The most obvious ones are to classic slapstick silent comedies from as far back as Mack Sennett and the Keystone Kops. In fact, the climax at the end is pretty much straight out of a Harold Lloyd movie. (Supposedly Harold Lloyd was asked to play the city official giving a speech at the building site but he couldn’t be lured out of retirement and Joe E. Brown was cast instead.) Less apparent is the influence of Preston Sturgeswho specialized in broad cynical farces during the 40s .
