On TV this afternoon was the 1956 David Niven movie Around the World in 80 Days which I hadn’t seen since childhood.
I was amazed to see that it began with broadcast journalist Edward R Murrow carrying on about a silent version of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon which is shown in part. Then cigarette toting Murrow gives us some platitudes about rockets making the world smaller…men of goodwill kind of stuff and somehow segues this into the start of the movie. There seemed to be about 5 or 6 minutes of this pre story guff.
I am trying to think of other examples of totally extraneous material in a movie but can’t think of anything like this.
Any takers?
Ed Wood was famous for splicing in totally rediculous and seemingly unconnected pieces of film footage into his movies.
But then that’s Ed Wood for ya.
There was a similar introductory bit in the 1956 sci-fi cheesefest The Mole People, starring John Agar, Hugh Beaumont, and Nestor Paiva (whoever he was–I just remember the name). The movie itself is certainly nothing to write home about; John and Hugh lead an archaeological expedition to discover a lost city in a giant cave, populated by the eponymous Mole People (not the homeless population under New York’s Central Park, but actual burrowing humanoids). Somewhere along the way John hooks up with a hot little blonde number, don’t ask me how that worked.
Anyhoo, at the beginning of the film there’s this several-minute long lecture by some eccentric college professor who expounds at length on the history of the Hollow Earth myth throughout the ages–he’s got anecdotes, diagrams, the whole nine yards. Why? Who knows? Maybe back in 1956, people still felt like they needed some faint justification for sitting through a patently goofy science fiction movie, and some flimsy pretext of redeeming educational value was still required. Today, of course, we’ve progressed far enough as a society that we can freely view films like The Core without shame.
Not quite the same thing, but Le Week-end has a bunch of short segments like that, usually just for their surreal value or to make some French New Wave-type comment about how movies are phoney. The one I remember the most (I saw it only once in around 1988): a scene plays out where a woman has just been in a car accident, and she’s fighting with the truck driver who just killed her boyfriend. It escalates into this bizarre fight involving everybody including the movie’s protagonists, who eventually just drive off. Immediately after, there’s a title card reading “Faux-tographie,” and then a shot of everyone in the previous scene (including the dead boyfriend) smiling and posing for the camera as in a family photo.
It reminded me of all the stuff in Run, Lola, Run where we see snapshots of the secondary characters’ lives after Lola runs into them.