Beginning of the End

(a shot of a plane in the air)
Mike and the Bots hum a song.

The little song that Mike and the ‘Bots sing is the “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones movies. I’ve already written about Indiana Jones and his movies in the Parts: the Clonus Horror section, but I’ll say a little bit more just to waste space. Every Indiana Jones movie has a scene where Indy gets on a plane, and his route is then shown on a map. This actually came from the old adventure serials that Indiana Jones is based on, but the Indy movies made it famous. The shot of a camera zooming out of the center of the swastika in a Nazi flag in Raiders of the Lost Ark (and jeez, is this a prepositional phrase-filled sentence) is lifted directly from a serial that Steven Spielberg enjoyed as a kid.


(the Heroine is on the phone ordering a colleague around)
Mike: Man, Her Guy Friday.

It’s a take on His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Grant and Russell play two newspaper reporters, newly divorced, but this is a 30’s screwball comedy so you know they’re going to get back together. Ralph Bellamy is in this also, as Russell’s bland-as-anything fiancé (huh). In the final scene she has to literally choose Grant or Bellamy; guess who she chooses? Hmm? This movie was directed by Howard Hawks, who also directed Grant in Bringing Up Baby and Only Angels Have Wings. Hawks often had everyone speak their lines at the same time so the dialogue would sound quick. It does. It's actually a remake of a 1931 movie titled The Front Page, which was remade again in 1974 with the same title, and starring Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, and Susan Sarandon.


(superimposed image of the Heroine over the rubble of the town)
Tom: What, is this Topper all of a sudden?

Wow! Two Two Two Cary Grant movies in one! One MST3K show, that is, as Mike and the ‘Bots reference another famous Grant comedy. Topper is considered the movie that put Cary Grant on the map—it was his first hit, if I remember correctly. It’s about a married couple who die in a car accident and come back in ghost form (explaining the superimposed image thing in Beginning of the End) to teach a loser how to have fun. Grant plays the dead husband (what, you thought he’d actually play a loser?). Coincidentally, the sequel to Topper starred Asta, the wire-haired terrier (made famous in The Thin Man) who had co-starred with Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth.


(Peter Graves walks down the alley with a soldier)
Mike: This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

One of the famous lines from Casablanca. Actually, it was the last line from the movie. There isn’t much more that I can tell you about this movie that I haven’t already written for the other episodes (look in the Space Mutiny and Overdrawn at the Memory Bank sections)—Humphrey Bogart. Claude Rains. Ingrid Bergman. Paul Henreid. Peter Lorre (the greatest character actor ever). Henreid actually didn’t like Bogart’s style of acting; he called him “wooden” or some such thing. And Bergman didn’t really like Henreid; she called him “dull”. Humphrey Bogart’s wife-at-the-time Mayo Methot believed that he and Bergman were having an affair while they were making this movie (and continually barged onto the set drunken and screaming), but there’s no evidence that she was correct in her assumption. When Bogart actually did have an affair with a co-star (Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not)—well, Methot could have torched the studios and she still wouldn’t have had a chance of stopping it. That’s not to say that she would have had a chance if Ingrid Bergman and Bogart were having an affair. I mean, look at Bergman, for God’s sake. In any case, Cary Grant doesn’t figure into this equation at all, so I’ll end it here (although he did star with Bergman in Notorious, and damn it if I’d be surprised if I found out that they had a thing going. The chemistry in that film was off the wall…)