Better guess than Bob Hope. . .

. . . and a much, much better guess than the late George Burns.

My above post should have gone under Chuck's Billy Wilder post below.


Wilder, BTW, was quite a guy. What a mind he must have had, conceiving and executing three such great and diverse films as Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity, and Some Like It Hot.

Andy,


Another Wilder film--often overlooked--but certainly in the class with those you mentioned is Ball of Fire with Barbara Stanwyck as "Snow White" (well, sort of). Not only does it feature great performances by well known character actors, it's a fascinating look at the wonderfully malleability of the English language. Ensconced in their ivory tower, the seven dwarfs--a bunch of professors who are writing an encyclopedia entry for "Slang"--encounter all sorts of "American" characters, from strippers to mobsters to cab drivers.


My favorite line occurs when a cab driver needs an answer to a question for a contest entry; the correct answer must be submitted with a number of boxtops. The cab driver says, "You got the brains, but I got the boxtops."


I'm reminded that Wilder, a German immigrant, learned the idiosyncracies of American English by listening to baseball games on the radio, and for the rest of his life would pepper his conversations with allusions to baseball.


John