Foster Dummy
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
Do you lie awake nights dreaming about movies? I do and sometimes I mumble the dialogue in my sleep which can be upsetting for Mary if it is from a horror movie. There have been so many memorable lines from so many great movies that we will remember forever. No one will ever will forget Clark Gable’s ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ from Gone With the Wind, if for no other reason than all the bluenoses at the time were shocked by the foul language and protested. Jack Nicholson’s, “’You can’t handle the truth,’ from A Few Good Men and Bogie’s ‘Here’s looking at you kid,’ from Casablanca are two more.
‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine . . . wait that one never made it to the silver screen. Pity really!
There have been so many great lines spoken in the movies over the years; and once you hear them, the scene, the tension, and sometimes the heartbreak that accompanied them instantly comes to mind. When we first saw the movie, we really weren’t sure if Ilsa was going to stay in Casablanca with Rick, or leave with her husband, Victor, but after watching it for the 76th time even I began to catch on and stopped betting. A good thing too, I was down a hundred bucks. Personally I would have stayed. Victor had a good chance of being shot.
But the greatest line of them all has to be, ‘I’ll have what she is having’ from When Harry Met Sally.
It was a great movie and it came out (if you can imagine) 36 years ago. I can still see the look on the lady’s face when she nodded to the server and said it during Meg’s fake orgasm scene. I tried to recreate that scene in my sleep one night and Mary called 911.
I heard somewhere the woman in Katz’s Delicatessen was Billy Crystal’s mother but I haven’t been able to find out if she really was. I know it wasn’t my mother because she had never been to New York and even if she had she would never have been in that particular restaurant since French Onion soup wasn’t on the menu.
When Harry Met Sally is considered the greatest romantic comedy of all time by many of the movie industry’s most respected critics, but what is even more important, so do I. I don’t know if you remember this but Meg said the big F-word half-way through the movie. I wasn’t shocked at the time, having never heard the word before, but I certainly was after I looked it up.
I have always been a sucker for romantic movies, everyone knows that, I have written about them so often. I have seen every one of Meg Ryan’s movies at least five times which has caused more than a few problems in our marriage, or did until on the advice of our marriage counselor, I took down her picture from the bedroom ceiling. Of course, Mary’s Tom Hanks picture is still up there. That’s what I get for agreeing to see a lady counselor.
I have always been a romantic soul. As a young boy in East York, I would go to all the matinees at the old Oxford Theatre on the Danforth and fall in love with whoever the starlet was in the picture. I would walk home in a daze and dream about her that night. Finally my mother had to step in and made me wear oven mitts to bed (probably too much information)
It didn’t matter who the star was I loved them all. I was the only kid in Toronto with a Marjorie Main poster beside my bed. I haven’t seen Marjorie in any new movies lately; she either retired or rides up and down the stairs every night in an Acorn Chairlift commercial. Hot damn, she was a looker.
I am possibly the only man in North America who got turned on in The Dirty Dozen when Lee Marvin brought a truckload of hooker-persons in for his troop of criminals’ going away party. I was asked to leave the theatre for moaning. That movie came out in 1967 and I tried to enlist in the American Army to get in on the fun but Donald Trump, who went with me, and I were both turned down – bone spurs I think the medical examiners said.
(Image Supplied)
Rants & Raves
