Leech Woman

English Man: Stay away from the river’s edge…
Tom: That Crispin Glover is creepy.

Crispin Glover (who is better known as the nerdy dad in the Back to the Future trilogy) played a punk kid in The River’s Edge, which was about a group of kids who find a dead body near, uh, a river. Glover is, indeed, creepy.


(Leech Woman, having not had pineal juice for a long time, turns into a white-haired, wrinkly old lady…)
Mike: It’s Barbara Stanwyck!

She really does look like Barbara Stanwyck! It’s a bit eerie and, as a result, I actually feel really bad for Barbara Stanwyck because of it. Anyway, she was a famous movie star in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s and '50's, acting in films like Double Indemnity and Balls of Fire and (with Humphrey Bogart) The Two Mrs. Carrolls. The Two Mrs. Carrolls is about a woman (Barbara) who marries a painter (Bogie) who she realizes killed his two previous wives. Before they die under mysterious circumstances, he would paint their portraits as angels of death. Hmm…one would think…


(English Man is getting flirty with Leech Woman)
Crow: Uh oh, he’s Niven-ing!

David Niven was a British actor who was in nearly all of the Pink Panther movies. He was also in a lot of other Hollywood movies, including The Prisoner of Zenda, Wuthering Heights, and Murder by Death, which I think is hilarious. I don’t know why “Niven-ing”—as Crow put it—would be such a bad thing but, hey, the guy knows what he’s talking about, I guess.


(a shot of a drunk stumbling out of a bar)
Crow: Oh, Uncle Billy!

Uncle Billy was the cute, absent-minded uncle in It’s A Wonderful Life, who at one point in the movie gets really drunk. He has a bit of rapport with George Bailey, then walks off the screen, and next thing you hear what sounds like a dozen garbage cans getting knocked over. George (Jimmy Stewart) looks surprised and then smiles. What really happened was, Thomas Mitchell (who plays Uncle Billy) walked out of the shot, and a crewmember accidentally dropped a whole lot of props, which caused the noise. The crewmember thought he’d be fired, but he ended up getting a 50-dollar bonus from the film’s director, Frank Capra! Thomas Mitchell, by the way, played Gerald O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.


(Leech Woman and her husband are bickering)
Crow: And don’t forget, Nick and Honey are coming over…

Ref to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was the best Taylor-Burton film (better than Cleopatra, which actually isn’t that good to begin with). Although I’m not a huge fan of Elizabeth Taylor (I don’t mind her, I mean), I am a huge fan of Richard Burton, who never got the respect he deserved. He was in great movies like The Longest Day, Look Back in Anger, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Look Back in Anger is considered the first of the British Angry Young Man movies (which is self-explanatory). The Angry Young Man movies include The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and A Kind of Loving, and made stars of Burton, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and (mah boy) Alan Bates (there’s actually some debate over whether Bates should be considered an Angry Young Man actor, because although he did make his name in this era, and he was in the stage version of Look Back in Anger, most of his movies were not actually AYM movies. I’m inclined to agree with this. But I do consider A Kind of Loving an AYM movie—also known as a “kitchen sink drama”—so I’ve included him). Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor (twice) and made some movies opposite her, but this one is the best, as I already stated. They play a married couple who more or less hate each other, and they have an all-night party with Nick and Honey, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Which is what Crow is referencing.


(Cigarette-smoking smarmy man walks to the Heroine [would you really call her a “heroine”, seeing as how she kills about ten people in the movie?])
Mike: The desperately poor man’s Humphrey Bogart.

The guy in this movie looks a little like Humphrey Bogart, at least in that shot, and he’s about to make out with an extremely old woman for money, which is why Mike calls him desperate. Humphrey Bogart (ooh, I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about him) is considered by most everyone (including leading sources in the matter, like the American Film Institute, Entertainment Weekly, and Empire) to be the greatest actor of all time. He was the star of such classics as Casablanca (arguably the best movie of all time), The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Big Sleep, High Sierra, The Caine Mutiny, The African Queen (for which he won his only Oscar), Key Largo, To Have and Have Not, and Sabrina. He is one of my favorite actors (along with Cary Grant) and personally I recommend Casablanca, The Big Sleep, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre if you want to see some great movies (all the ones I listed above are really good too).


(same guy as above)
Crow: Hi, Peter Lorre’s M!

I like how Crow says that line, but he said it, “Lorryesem” (once again, the mispronunciation, I swear to God), which is why it took me a while to figure out what he was saying. M was a famous pre-Nazi German movie starring Peter Lorre as a child murderer. It’s titled M because a blind man writes the letter on Lorre’s shoulder, which ultimately gets him caught. It’s in this movie that Lorre says a very famous line—and it’s also actually quite chilling, for all its simplicity—“I can’t help myself!” When the Nazis took over, they used that scene in their famous propaganda film The Eternal Jew, and dubbed over Lorre’s lines to make it sound like he was talking about being a Jew. Hitler named Peter Lorre one of the best actors in Germany—not knowing that Lorre was Jewish. Lorre subsequently fled to Hollywood. Hitler cemented his role in history as most dangerous idiot.


(Leech Lady is looking wistfully at…someone)
Servo: You know it, Sam (and he sings a little ditty)

Good thing Servo didn’t say, “Play it again, Sam” or he would’ve gotten beat down by film enthusiasts. In Casablanca, no one ever said, “Play it again, Sam.” Bergman says, “Play it, Sam, for old time’s sake”. Bogart says, “Now play it!” But never “Play it again.” The song Servo hums is “As Time Goes By”, sung (but not played) by Dooley Wilson. Wilson was a drummer when he auditioned for the role—couldn’t play a lick on the piano. So he pretended to play on the piano as a record played offstage.


(The title pops up)
Mike: The Sean Young story!

Sean Young is an actress whose fame peaked in the 1980’s—she was in Blade Runner, most notably. She’s a rather good actress, but unfortunately she’s most known for her relationship with James Woods. After this rather intense relationship, she allegedly began to stalk him, doing Fatal Attraction-ish things. It ultimately ended with Woods getting a restraining order on her. In the 90’s she was in Ace Ventura and some other movies. Oh well.


(walking through the jungle…)
Servo: Out of Africa.
Mike: Don’t worry, there’s more in the trunk.

I like the groan uttered by Crow, because I thought the joke was corny too. Anywho, Out of Africa was one of those epic films that garnered millions upon millions of Oscars. It stars Meryl Streep as the Dutch writer Karen Blixen, who travels to East Africa (although Leech Woman also takes place in Africa, there are no jungle scenes in Out of Africa) to be with her philandering husband. Luckily for her (and unluckily for her husband, I suppose), there’s a hunter living nearby, and he’s played by Robert Redford! Smart girl that she is, she falls for him, he falls for her, and they both fall for each other. This is actually a very nice, very romantic, and rather sad movie (and has a lot in common with The English Patient, now that I think about it). If you’ve got two and a half hours to spare, and feel like a good cry, then rent this movie. Oh yeah, and it has Robert Redford. I think he’s dreamy (and…uh…a good actor too…yeah…uh...)


(more stock footage)
Tom (in what I’m supposing is a bird’s voice): Alfred Hitchcock’s The Us!

The Birds. They’re birds, Tom’s speaking for them. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Hell of a lot of birds—including crows—in that film.