Wednesday, 20 January 2021—DAY SIX

 

Hello movie fans.  If it's Wednesday, it must be Tuesday.  Welcome to our second Tuesday edition of Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game.  For those joining us for the first time, the game is simple.  Below, there are ten screenshots, each from a different film.  Identify each of the ten with its correct title.  Post your responses in the "Comments" section below or in the appropriate thread at FPN.  Expect today's lineup to be somewhat more challenging than yesterday's.

And speaking of yesterday, here are the correct titles:

1.

Midnight Cowboy (1969)

2.

Ghostbusters (1984)

3.

The Graduate (1967)

4.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

5.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

6.

Rear Window (1954)

7.

Witness (1985)

8.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

9.

The Sting (1973)

10.

Elmer Gantry (1960)

Congratulations to catbert, Ruth, and Paul for correctly identifying all ten of yesterday's movies.

[Continued from yesterday]

For Hedy Lamarr's first American film, Louis B. Mayer at M.G.M. lent her to independent film producer Walter Wanger who cast her as the female lead in his movie Algiers (1938), with romantic sensation Charles Boyer.  The movie was a sensation.  And the Hollywood press instantly dubbed Lamarr "the most beautiful woman in the world."  (She and Boyer reprised their roles in a 1941 Lux Radio Theatre production of Algiers.)

Algiers was the inspiration for Casablanca (1942).  In fact, Warner Brothers offered Lamarr the role of Ilsa Lund.  Lamarr turned it down.  She was also offered the role of Paula Alquist in Gaslight.  She turned that role down too.  Both roles went to Ingrid Bergman.

Nevertheless, Lamarr was a busy actor after Algiers.  She worked with the top male stars at M.G.M.—Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, William Powell, and Robert Taylor.  Her roles for M.G.M., and later RKO—and the films' advertising—took advantage of her beauty and sensuality from head to toe in movies like Lady of the Tropics (1939); Tortilla Flat (1942); Crossroads (1942); White Cargo (1942); The Heavenly Body (1944); Dishonored Lady; the blockbuster Samson and Delilah (1949), with Lamarr as Delilah, her favorite role, under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille; A Lady Without a Passport (1950); and Loves of Three Queens (1954).

It turned out, however, that perhaps her greatest talent came through her hobby—inventing.  She invented an improved traffic light and a tablet that dissolved in soda water to make a soft drink.  While dating Howard Hughes, the movie mogul and aviation pioneer was struck by her inventiveness and put his aviation engineers and lab at her disposal.

Early in WWII, the allies discovered that their navies' radio-controlled torpedoes were easily jammed by the Germans.  Lamarr decided to invent something that would make allied torpedoes undetectable using what's known as frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.  And she did, with the help of her friend, George Antheil, a pianist and composer.  (A miniature player-piano mechanism was required to perfect the design.)

The invention was patented in 1942 and presented to the Department of the Navy.  But the U.S. Navy was unreceptive to outside inventions during wartime, and it did not adopt the technology until 1957.  By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the technology was being used on Navy ships.

In the 1950s, Lamarr's film career went into a steep decline.  By the mid-60s she was impoverished and living as a recluse.  Her living condition was revealed in a Look magazine article, replete with a photo that showed her run-down Cadillac Eldorado, and on the driver's door were her initials made with Blue Chip Stamps.  When she died in 2000, she was penniless.

Spread spectrum technology found renewed interest in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It is used in Bluetooth and was similar to the technologies used in early Wi-Fi.  Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil were inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Here are today's buffer images:

Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, and David Landau in Horse Feathers (1932)

Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, and Louis Calhern in Duck Soup (1933)

All right, everyone.  Are you ready to play?  Then let's play!  Good luck and have fun!

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