Watched TCM Last Evening

[Onion Monster]

The Big Sleep was shown and I was amazed at the level of detail in the horse racing metaphor used in this particular scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDQHnA8skfY

Playing the horses was so ingrained in American culture at the time that such a reference was assumed to be understood, on both levels, by the movie going audiences. Today, I doubt more than 10% of the crowd would know what the hell they were talking about. I just thought it was neat.

[joanied]

That was cool:ThmbUp:

[schweitz]

Watched it last night myself and thought the same thing, and this wasn't even a "horse racing" related movie.

[bigmack]

The Big Sleep was penned by William Faulkner.

The Western Union wire chief was puzzled.
It was May 1955, and he had been handed the first 300-word installment of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Faulkner’s account of Kentucky Derby week.

The piece was so memorable that crooner Bing Crosby, a horse lover and racing fan, read it aloud for a recording.
“Once the horse moved man’s physical body and his household goods and his articles of commerce from one place to another,” Faulkner wrote. “Nowadays all it moves is a part or the whole of his bank account, either through betting on it or trying to keep owning and feeding it.”

Later in the piece, Faulkner described what happened after the starting gate opens. “Though you do not really know what it was you heard: whether it was that metallic clash, or the simultaneous thunder of the hooves in that first leap or the massed voices, the gasp, the exhilaration — whatever it was, the clump of horses indistinguishable yet, like a brown wave dotted with the bright silks of the riders like chips flowing toward us along the rail until, approaching, we can begin to distinguish individuals, streaming past us now as individual horses — horses which (including the rider) once stood about eight feet tall and 10 feet long, now look like arrows twice that length and less than half that thickness, shooting past and bunching again as perspective diminishes, then becoming individual horses once more around the turn into the backstretch, streaming on, to bunch for the last time into the homestretch itself, then again individuals, individual horses, the individual horse, the Horse: 2:014⁄5 minutes.”

Faulkner never mentioned the winner, a chestnut colt called Swaps, or jockey Bill Shoemaker by name. Instead, Faulkner painted this picture of the horse immediately after the Derby had been run: “And now he stands beneath the rose escarpment above the flash and glare of the magnesium and the whirring film of celluloid immortality. This is the moment, the peak, the pinnacle; after this, all is ebb.”

Nice piece: http://www.heraldleaderphoto.com/derby/2009/05/01/faulkner-yes-william-once-captured-derbys-essence-in-prose/

http://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/images/faulkner_pic.jpg

[JustRalph]

I have it on DVD.....my fav Bogey movie...............love that scene

[OTM Al]

The Big Sleep was penned by William Faulkner.

This version of the sceenplay had Faulkner as a co-writer. Raymond Chandler wrote the original, which this version stayed fairly close to.

[Rutgers]

I have it on DVD.....my fav Bogey movie...............love that scene

I am giving my niece the DVD for Christmas as part of a Bogey and Bacall collection. (She is a college sophmore and a big fan of old movies)

I will make it the first one I borrow. :)

[JustRalph]

The opening scene where Bogey sits down with the old man with the money and starts sweating is great.........plays it to the hilt

I also love the Lady Cab driver and the girl in the bookstore who fawn all over him...........I never thought of him as a ladies man........but they play it that way...........