I think I’ve mentioned this one in another thread recently. Frank Capra’s classic film Lost Horizon was forever ruined for me at the very beginning by a note he posted at the very beginning. I suppose he wanted to make the story more relatable or “homely”, but it immediately took me right out of the spirit of the thing:
In these days of wars and rumors of wars - haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight?
Of course you have. So has every man since time began. Always the same dream. Sometimes he calls it Utopia - Sometimes the Fountain of Youth - Sometimes merely “that little chicken farm.”
…and that did it
“Little chicken farm”.
My image of a chicken farm was one of those big low-tech buildings crammed with chickens , open to the air, and encrusted with disgusting chicken crap, baking in the summer sun. We used to pass these on our way down to the Jersey shore, and they were completely disgusting. Once Capra’s Shangri-la was perfumed with the stench of a chicken farm, there was no going back – it was completely ruined, no matter how grand the architecture was.
Well, to be fair to Capra, modern commercial chicken farming began in the 20s. Lost Horizon came out in 1937, when the development of commercial chicken farming was well under way, but still early enough that the nostalgic farms of old were still well within living memory; some may have still been around then.
Before modern commercial chicken facilities, a bucolic family farm would have a chicken coop with maybe a couple dozen chickens, the farmer would send one of his kids to gather eggs to take into town and sell, and the older chickens that stopped laying ended up on the Sunday dinner table. That’s “that little chicken farm” that Capra was envisioning.
But yeah, by the time you reached kidhood, the “little chicken farm” looked more like this:
I’m just saying that , based on my own life experiences, the image (and smell) that his stupid little note brought up has forever ruined that film for me. It’s a stupid thing, but there it is. My point is that it was completely unnecesary – people would have gotten the point without his little spiel trying to make it more relatable.
Yeah, I get where you’re coming from, but Capra’s whole thing was creating an atmosphere of homey, nostalgic idealism. To question any part of that is to begin going down a bad path, where you might eventually decide that Capra’s whole oeuvre was nothing but manipulative Glurge. Heaven forbid!
It does not add realism to have jerky camera movements. In real life, people actually pan from one object or person to another without the visual target leaping about.
Grossly ahistorical movies are hard to accept. Oliver Stone makiing D.A. Jim Garrison into a hero uncovering conspiracy in ‘J.F.K.’, as opposed to the reality of Garrison being a semi-unhinged, self-promoting sleazebag, made that movie hard to take except as a sort of comedy.
On the other hand, Indiana Jones clinging to the outside of a U-boat traveling hundreds of miles or more and arriving safely in port without the sub ever submerging for evasion or training purposes, didn’t really bother me at all.
Not that surprising, really. Subs travel faster on the surface, and it doesn’t run the batteries (which you might really need later) down. I can see not training while on a mission.
Ever-reliable AI informs us that "While on a tour of duty (war patrol), German U-boat crews conducted critical training drills (including crash dives)on a near-daily basis. Though maybe in the mid-'30s when the movie was set, they were more lax about such things.
But it made for a great D&D line. We were playing with a DMs who just loved horses. She insisted on us getting all the details- horse blanket, saddle, and especially food right- she insisted our warhorses needed grain, not just graze. Our poor mounts were not doing well, since we had not brought many hundreds of pounds of grain along. Thus, when we saw a castle ahead, I asked if we could get grain for the horses there, and she said yes. So I said “Yonder lies the castle of our fodder”.
Just the other day I saw a Nash Bridges episode where the title character is driving his expensive muscle car and chatting away with his partner Joe when he strikes a skater. And Joe insists (through most of the episode) that Nash wasn’t watching the road. The episode was a parade of Nash’s friends and coworkers urging him to settle, but he dug his heels in. Alas, they wrote it so the skater was revealed at the end to be a scammer who wasn’t really hit. I was really hoping they’d carry through on this old saw for once.
You can hear the German sailors yelling “dive, dive” so it did submerge. In the original script, the U-boat submerged to periscope depth while Indy clung to the periscope, eventually lashing himself to it with his trusty whip and getting dragged all the way to the island. They even filmed or at least considered filming it.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s more believable that it never submerged, or that he could belly-surf behind a sub that inexplicably kept its periscope up for the entire trip.
Ok, but your statement was not only more general than that (just “subs”), but you also spoke in the present tense.
IME, people have so many misconceptions about modern submarines that I try to dispel them when I come across them (assuming nothing classified is involved, of course). I suspect many of these misconceptions come from old WWII movies.
There was a war going on in 1936- The Second Italo-Ethiopian War Started in 1935. It caused issues with shipping in the med.
Egypt was technically neutral until 26 August 1936 , when they signed the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936. Even so, there were limitations on British troops, etc.
The Ahnenerbe was formed in 1935. It had no expeditions in Egypt.
My thinking of Indy and the Sub was that it briefly submerged , then ran on diesel until the island. How Indy was not spotted is a … miracle!
Parts are, but the thing is that most of the historical events didn’t take place in the desert-ish areas, with one exception.
The Goodnight-Loving Trail for cattle drives did drive cattle from Fort Belknap (NW of Abilene) south to Ft. Concho (near San Angelo), and from there, west to the Pecos River and into New Mexico. Then they drove them north to Denver along the eastern edge of the Rockies. That particular cattle drive would have had deserts, mountains, etc..
Most of the other cattle trails ran somewhere west of Fort Worth, but not that far. In fact, the famous Chisholm Trail more or less mirrored today’s I-35 route, and the prior Shawnee Trail went straight through Dallas. No mountains, not desert either.
The Texas Revolution? Took place mostly between San Antonio and Houston, with a few sites like Goliad being even closer to the coast. No mountains anywhere near there, and not terribly dry either.
