The President’s Mystery

Franklin Roosevelt was a voracious reader of crime novels. “Hundreds are published every year, but even in the good ones, there is a sameness,” he complained over lunch to Liberty Magazine editor Fulton Oursler one day in 1935. “Someone finds the corpse, and then the detective tracks down the murderer.”

Oursler asked him whether he had any better ideas. He did: “How can a man disappear with five million dollars of his own money in negotiable form and not be traced?” Roosevelt said he had carried that question in his mind for years but had not solved it himself.

The editor knew a marketable idea when he heard one, and he recruited six of the period’s top mystery writers to work on a chain novel that appeared serially in the magazine beginning that November. (The writers were Rupert Hughes, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Anthony Abbott, Rita Weiman, S.S. Van Dine, and John Erskine.)

A year later the story was made into a film, above, with the memorable credit “Story Conceived by Franklin D. Roosevelt.” FDR remains the only president to earn a film-writing credit while in office.

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A Feathered Nest

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Image: Flickr

Characterizations of Scrooge McDuck’s wealth in the drawn stories of creator Carl Barks:

  • 250 umptillion fabulatillion dollars
  • 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.16 dollars
  • Fantasticatrillionaire
  • Five billion quadruplatillion umtuplatillion multuplatillion fantasticatillion centrifugalillion dollars and sixteen cents
  • Five billion quintuplatillion umptuplatillion multuplatillion impossibidillion and so forth dollars and extra odd cents
  • Five hundred triplicatillion multipludillion quadruplicatillion centrifugalillion dollars and sixteen cents
  • Hyperfantasticatillionaire
  • Nine fantasticatillion, four billionjillion, centrifugalillion dollars and sixteen cents
  • Nine hundred fantasticatillion, seven hundred doubledecadecillion, eight hundred kumquatmafrillion …
  • One quadrillion amplifatillion dollars
  • One umptillion uncountabalillions of dollars
  • Seven hundred and eighty-eight billion, four hundred and twenty-three million seventeen dollars and sixteen cents
  • Ten skyrillion dollars
  • Three cubic acres
  • Three skyrillion dollars

In Forbes‘ estimation, McDuck’s wealth rose from $28.8 billion in 2007 to $44.1 billion in 2011 due to a rise in gold prices, but his total worth is notoriously hard to estimate. The famous money bin, he once told his nephews, is “just petty cash.”

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The Wilcoxon Speech

The war drama Mrs. Miniver dominated the box office in 1942 and won six Oscars, but it’s remembered today chiefly for its final scene, in which a town vicar gives an inspiring speech in a bombed church, exhorting his flock to “free ourselves and those who come after us from the tyranny and terror that threaten to strike us down.”

The film was made before America had formally entered the war, and director William Wyler had rewritten this speech repeatedly on the night before shooting, in hopes that it would sway public opinion. “I’m a warmonger,” he said simply. “I was deeply concerned about Americans being isolationists. Mrs. Miniver obviously was a propaganda film.”

It succeeded beyond his hopes. Churchill claimed that the speech was “propaganda worth a hundred battleships,” and after a private screening at the White House, Franklin Roosevelt asked that it be translated into French, German, and Italian, broadcast throughout Europe on the Voice of America, and air-dropped in millions of leaflets into German-occupied territories.

Henry Wilcoxon, the actor who delivered the speech, must have had his own feelings about this — his only brother had been fatally injured at Dunkirk in 1940.

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Playing to Type

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

When we see Tom Hanks in a film, we think of him as a decent, honest everyman in part because we’ve seen him play decent, honest everymen in many other movies. Casting directors choose him in part for this reason — they know that the audience has established a sense of his persona from previous films, and that this affects their perception of him. We all know this; actors are hired deliberately to elicit these effects.

But a movie is fiction, and enjoying it requires restricting our attention to the fictional world in which it takes place. As experienced moviegoers, if we see the hero dangling from a cliff early in the film, we know that he’ll survive, but we repress this knowledge in order to enjoy the suspense that the filmmakers intend. We put our knowledge of movie lore on hold.

But isn’t this precisely the same sort of movie lore that we use when we let a star’s persona fill out the character he or she is playing?

“Why is it appropriate to put our knowledge of star personae to work when watching a movie, but not our knowledge of how popular plots go 99.9% of the time?” asks CUNY philosopher Noël Carroll. “Why is access to one kind of movie lore legitimate and access to the other kind not?”

(Noël Carroll, “The Problem With Movie Stars,” in his Minerva’s Night Out, 2013.)

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Boo!

In honor of Halloween, here’s the first horror film, Georges Méliès’ The Haunted Castle. Originally released in 1896, the year before Dracula was published, it had been thought to be lost until 1988, when a copy was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive.

Though it’s full of horrific trappings, in general Méliès intended it to amuse and astonish rather than to shock. The filmmaker himself appears as Mephistopheles, and the woman conjured from the cauldron is Jehanne d’Alcy, who would become his second wife.

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Character Study

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The Art Institute of Chicago has an actual picture of Dorian Gray — Ivan Le Lorraine Albright painted it for the 1946 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel. Working with his twin brother Malvin, Albright started with a pleasant portrait of star Hurd Hatfield and prepared three further canvases reflecting his character’s moral decay.

“For research for these paintings,” reported LIFE, “the twins made the rounds of the local insane asylums, alcoholic wards and hospitals for the incurably diseased.” Even the props in the background were corrupted — the Egyptian cat grows gray and mangy, and Ivan tore the rug and soaked it with acid.

Interestingly, though most of the film was shot in black and white, the portrait was shown in Technicolor — which may have helped the film win its Oscar for best cinematography.

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Upscale

lucas birdhouse

The birdhouse at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch is a replica of the 50,000-foot main house. Working from the original blueprints, architect Thomas Burke produced the structure in four months and installed it in April 2011. Roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, it has four levels and 50 individual compartments, each with a separate entry made of PVC piping.

(Via Anne Schmauss, Birdhouses of the World, 2014.)

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Wandering Minds

Here’s a macabre fad from Victorian Britain: headless portraits, in which sitters held their severed heads in their hands, on platters, or by the hair, occasionally even displaying the weapons by which they’d freed them.

Photographer Samuel Kay Balbirnie ran advertisements in the Brighton Daily News offering “HEADLESS PHOTOGRAPHS – Ladies and Gentlemen Taken Showing Their Heads Floating in the Air or in Their Laps.”

| Death · Entertainment · History · Oddities · Technology

The Vesper

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the first James Bond novel, 1953’s Casino Royale, Bond orders a drink of his own invention:

‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’

‘Oui, monsieur.’

‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’

‘Certainly monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

‘Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,’ said Leiter.

Bond laughed. ‘When I’m … er … concentrating,’ he explained, ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name.’

The name he thinks of is the Vesper, ostensibly inspired by the character Vesper Lynd. But in fact the recipe wasn’t original to Bond — Fleming had first received the drink from the butler of an elderly couple in Jamaica — it was named after vespers, a service of evening prayer. Bond says, “It sounds perfect and it’s very appropriate to the violet hour when my cocktail will now be drunk all over the world.” He’d have trouble getting one today — Kina Lillet was discontinued in 1986, and the strength of Gordon’s Gin was reduced in 1992.

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