flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (03/24/84)
--- One sees the 1946 film "The Spanish Main" occasionally on television, and network readers may be interested in a review of the movie that was published in The Observer when the movie first appeared: "The Spanish Main," which is not meant to be funny, seems to me a much funnier pirate picture than "The Princess and the Pirate," which was. It is an incredibly genteel account of the adventures of a Mexican heiress with an Irish accent (Maureen O'Hara), who is betrothed to a Spanish Governor with an Austrian accent (Walter Slezak). On her way to her wedding she is abducted and married by a Dutch pirate with another Austrian accent (Paul Henreid). Since the lady has brought her trousseau, her vanity case, and her hairdresser with her, she is able to dress for dinner with some formality aboard the pirate ship, and lend quite a tone to the captain's table. Unhappily, the sight of her deep decolletage and the blue baby ribbons she affects in her hair proves too much for the pirate's ex-fiancee (Binnie Barnes), an outdoor type with a wardrobe confined to two crisply laundered blouses and a couple of golfing outfits. With her eye on a Brussels lace nightgown, she betrays the married couple to the jilted governor, and it is then that the heroine's fully- fashioned, non-austerity models prove really useful. For she manages to secrete in their folds (1) a dagger, (2) a horse pistol, (3) a rapier, and (4) the keys to all the cells in the local prison. With a hurried plea, for she is a tender-hearted girl, that the apoplectic governor shall be allowed to live and 'find a way to do some useful work,' she puts out to sea again with her pirate husband, prudently reappropriating the nightgown, still incredibly free from signs of wear and tear. The last shot shows the happy couple sailing away toward the Carolinas, into a Technicolor sun rising boldly and bloodily in the west. NOTE: Herodotus records the same phenomenon on the authority of the Egyptian priests. In eleven thousand three hundred and forty years, he declares, 'they related that the sun had four times risen out of his usual quarter, and that he had twice risen where he now sets, and twice set where he now rises.' On none of these occasions, he adds, had the phenomenon been accompanied by other curious manifestations, a point in which superiority must be allowed to "The Spanish Main."
amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson) (03/26/84)
In the final scene of The Green Berets, John Wayne is walking along the shore at Cam Ranh Bay, watching the sun set into the South China Sea. This is just as good a trick as having the sun rise in the west. John Hobson AT&T Bell Labs--Naperville, IL ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2 P.S. I saw tGB in a Special Forces camp in Vietnam. All the REAL green beanies thought that it was hilarious (no, I was not one, just a simple airborne ranger).