Great Moments in Cinema: The Giant Head in The Sun Also Rises

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When you’re willing to waste the talents of Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, and Eddie Albert, you better have something to show for your efforts, and Henry King’s sadly mediocre The Sun Also Rises (USA, 1957) makes up for the film’s non-Hemingway-esque ending with a gem of a shot:

It's a giant drinking head. Huh. Don't see that often.

With all of Hollywood’s focus on CGI effects these days, you just don’t find such fine papier-mâché craftsmanship anymore, and I doubt there are many actors who could pull one off (literally, perhaps). The entire fiesta sequence of the film is, indeed, one long paean to the giant papier-mâché head in all its glory.

Lost Toys: Marx Toys’ Navarone Play Set

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At some point, I suppose it’s inevitable that one looks back upon childhood and thinks about toys. No matter your generation, your toys were much cooler than the new-fangled gizmos the current generation plays with, and darn it, I’m right about that. Because not much can compare to Marx Toys’ Navarone Play Set!

Installing the Guns of Navarone

Note that this large, grey play set, displayed here in a happy moment on Christmas Day, 1976, does not seem to be officially linked to Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone action-thriller novel from 1957 nor the 1961 movie based upon the same. There’s no tie-in language on the packaging, which can be seen in a story on the Official Marx Toy Museum from the July 13, 2008, Reading Eagle, and the name of the play set from the box is “Famous World War II Battle of Navarone Giant Play Set,” not “The Guns of Navarone Play Set.”

But, um, Navarone doesn’t actually exist outside of MacLean’s fervid imagination, and there was no “Famous World War II Battle” there outside of book covers or movie theaters. I suppose IP lawyers were less active in those days. To live in simpler times…

The play set itself was, for a young lad, a work of beauty and genius all at once. Lots of cannons, rope ladders for scaling the face of the mountain, a working elevator in the back, and even bunk beds! And tons and tons of plastic army men—not that I didn’t have tons anyway, but more was always better. It was, in truth, sort of a Barbie house for plastic army men, though one bristled at the comparison at the time.

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The TastyPie’s New Clothes

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I’m certainly no traditionalist when it comes to Philadelphia foods—my iconoclastic leanings see me prefer the roast pork sandwich over the cheesesteak, wit or witout—but changing my beloved TastyPie? What manner of sacrilege is this?

New Box. Same Pie?

On entering a trusty Wawa not too long ago, I was confronted with one of these creme-colored boxes, purporting to house an authentic TastyPie.

For the sadly uninitiated, a TastyPie is traditionally housed in a blue cardboard box, the top wrapped in cellophane (a Coconut Creme example shown below, opened in the only proper TastyPie extraction method):

Why change a good thing?

Were these changes merely box-deep, or had some terrible, marketing-driven alchemy altered the substance within?

I had to find out…

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A Rendezvous with "C’était un rendez-vous"

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Now, I’m no gearhead, but through my recent experiences with Forza 3, I’ve gained a slight appreciation for the sound of a fine engine as it pushes the redline then drops down after a smooth shift. Engines actually sound differently at different revolutions. Who would have thunk?

So when Wired ran a story featuring a short film with Jay Leno taking his new AMG SLS out for a spin on the near-deserted early-morning streets of Los Angeles in homage to a film called C’était un rendez-vous, I was curious:

You’d have to be mad to try to remake Rendezvous, Claude Lelouche’s high-speed dash through the streets of Paris at dawn. Rendezvous is a classic. A one-off. It is best left alone, as that remake The Run showed.

But that’s not to say you can’t riff off it.

So I located the source film thanks to the magical Internet, and while I was disappointed that the engine noises are seemingly dubbed in, unlike the Leno film, I wasn’t disappointed at all in the nine-minute slice of cinéma vérité I found.

(Update: The video was pulled by the rights holder. There’s a short trailer on YouTube posted by the rights holder, but I can’t recommend it, as they place annoying synth-pop over the driving, which is even worse than the dubbed engine noise.)

It’s the little bit of artifice at the very end that makes this film art, rather than a reckless stunt. Without that scene, the literal “date” of the title, this is just a car driving very quickly through Paris.

How We Played the Game: The SPI "Infomercial"

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Courtesy of John Cooper on ConsimWorld, we have this “infomercial” (and, indeed, there’s not really any other way to describe it) created by SPI, one of the powerhouses of wargame design and publishing in the 1970’s:

The footage was apparently taken from a set of video tapes about Strategy and Tactics magazine (video reviews of the individual issues, according to a review of the set) by Big Bear Productions.

As far as explanations of wargaming go, this film succeeds in presenting the basics to laypeople and could serve the same expository function today as it did some thirty-five odd years ago, except maybe for the hairstyles and wide collars and all the smoking.

The segment about two minutes in, with stop-motion animation of counters marching across a map, is particularly effective—especially when a cavalry counter literally gallops across a bridge.

Several gaming faux pas exist in the film, however, most notably the rolling of dice on the map itself and the presence of open beverages on the gaming surface. Given that the footage seems to have been taken in SPI’s headquarters, though, I’d imagine that, in the event of a soaking, replacement counters and maps were but a room away…