I have officially solved a personal mystery!!!
(No, not #ghosthorse, sadly)
So. I have, for YEARS, had a collection of utterly random movie scenes in my head that I could not for the life of me attribute to a source. (Hereafter referred to as the Mystery Scenes.)
Six of them, to be exact.
Some of them were completely weird, some were slightly disturbing, and all of them, ALL OF THEM, were from something I saw as a little kid that was not, I repeat NOT, appropriate for my age. Sometimes, in hindsight, it was the movie that was inappropriate, sometimes just the scene. And I couldn’t remember jack about what movies these things came from. Drove me NUTS.
And y’all, I’m old, so we’re talking pre-google, by a long shot.
Over the years, and at the expense of a lot of people thinking I’m bonkers, I managed to track down five of them (I will post about those eventually if anyone is interested), including several things a babysitter should have prevented me from seeing (#tragicbackstory, but we’re talking televised violence rather than anything worse), and one MediaMouse children’s movie that my poor mom would have had no idea contained that.
However, the sixth remained elusive.
Like, super elusive. Like… google just went “?!?!” whenever I looked up the particulars of the scene.
… which was strange, considering just how particularly particular the details were.
Last night I found it!!!!!!
So here’s the story. I’m going to tell it in excruciating detail for several reasons:
It’s been OVER FIFTEEN FREAKING YEARS SINCE I SOLVED THE LAST ONE
The amount of effort and the number of lunatic logic leaps I had to take lead me to believe that figuring this mess out was a fluke because :
Google STILL doesn’t bring up the information even though it’s RIGHT THERE and;
I JUST HAPPENED to trip over a vague reference to it somewhere else so;
I’m putting this all out here to hopefully save someone else the brain ache.
And finally: my chagrin appears to entertain people. So you’re welcome.
Lately I have been on a mission to expand my other half’s horizons in terms of horror/thriller/chiller movies. He had not seen Psycho in years and barely remembered it, so we watched it. A+, everything went as planned, he loved it. We started talking about watching more Hitchcock, and he asked if I’d seen Vertigo, and I had a brief bluescreen moment while I tried to remember if I had, because one of the Mystery Scenes I figured out in college was from a Hitchcock but I’d forgotten the name again (turns out it was Spellbound.)
This got me thinking about that one last FREAKIN Mystery Scene, so I decided (masochistically) to try again.
So here’s what I remembered: a blonde burlesque dancer throwing fake snowballs into a crowd as part of her act, followed by a scary/ominous man catching one, sticking a knife into it, and throwing it back at her, where it stabbed her in the chest but no one noticed.
Freaky, huh? And distinctive.
So I googled “movie,” “blonde,” “snowball,” “knife,” “burlesque,” “dancer,” “knife in snowball (and snow ball because I’m thorough),” etc etc etc. NOTHING. Sometimes google would grab one word and give me something (like “burlesque” gave me the Cher movie) but no amount of quotation marks or specificity gave me anything close.
One random combination brought up a google books entry for a book about spies that mentioned a knife in a fake snowball. JOY! So I looked for a movie by the same name.
So I went back to the book… published in 2011. Double crap. This movie was in black and white and I saw it in the 80s.
But I kept digging. Eventually found the whole passage, and holy buckets, thank you Stuart M. Kaminsky because your book Smart Moves saved my sanity and solved a multi decade mystery (and reassured me that I hadn’t just dreamed up the whole insane scenario.)
Part of the passage in question (partially redacted, go read the book):
HOLY CRAP Y’ALL. I felt SEEN! I have never, NEVER seen anyone else refer to this freaking movie!!!! (And I concur, the scene isn’t funny, I was initially skeptical that it was even the same movie. Like, seriously, Bob Hope?! But I couldn’t accept that there were two movies with a scene like that and no one ever mentioned it. That way lies madness.)
Now, there was an unexpected amount of detective work left to do, apparently there are a surprising number of movies in which Bob Hope gets chased by spies, and none of them felt inclined to mention someone getting stabbed by a knife in a fake snowball. W.T.F.
But now I knew to look for a Bob Hope movie about spies AND had the name of the song. Progress.
FINALLY I found a summary for They Got Me Covered (1943) that listed “Palsy-Walsy” (which sounds like “pal,” as in friend, rather than the rather insensitive thing it looks like written down) on the soundtrack. Which led me to:
https://youtu.be/8hSpJGX7MY8
So here we are. I am vindicated, and now I understand better why I was allowed to see this (who would think to keep a child from watching a Bob Hope movie on network tv in the 80s?)
I’m not crazy (In this instance).
Apparently my memory is pretty good.
And I’m gonna tag the crap out of this post so that maybe someone else will be spared the pain.
stormborns
izzy806
romaincrisis
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
dededos
