'Midnight Meat Train'-Spotting: The Best Movie In-Jokes
What’s In A Name?
“The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat,” Cary Grant blusters in His Girl Friday. Leach, of course, was Grant’s real name. Michael Caine fans will recognize his real surname as the inspiration for the store named Micklewhite in The Muppet Christmas Carol. But you'd have to be a pretty die-hard film buff to get that several character names in Dante’s The Howling are the names of directors with werewolf films among their credits. Sam Newfield directed The Mad Monster (1942) and Charlie Barton helmed Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which featured the Wolf Man.
Perversely, when it comes to movie in-jokes, the more obscure, the better. What have you caught the rest of us missed? Leave them in the comments section.
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based film and entertainment writer. He has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Roger Ebert.com, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post and other outlets.
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Comments
Sam Raimi's 73 Oldsmobile is in every flick he does, with Quick and the Dead possibly being the only exception, unless he hid it really well.
Hidden under Sharon Stone's chassis?
The print on a tissue box in Toy Story 3 bears the same pattern as the carpet from the hotel in the Shining. Lee Unkrich, the Pixar director, is a HUGE fan.
Red rum.
It is obscure and I always thought of it as an easter egg but when Spencer Tracy's character is first introduced in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World he has his hand tucked into his suit and is dressed the same as his one armed character from Bad Day at Black Rock.
Fight Club starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter has a a street scene with cinema marquees showing "Seven Years in Tibet", "The People vs Larry Flynt" and "Wings of a Dove".
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You have described a extremely great things, thankyou for the post. Wit can be educated insolence. by Aristotle.