This article contains some spoilers.
; Intolerable Cruelty; Burn After Reading.
Join us as we unpack 13 references to old movies and gossip (and gossip columnists!)
from that era…
Hail, Caesar!
Technically speaking,Ben-Huris actually a literary product of the post-Civil War United States.
And that 1959 MGM classic is also a remake of a 1925 silent film by the same name.
ButHail, Caesar!is specifically nodding (and perhaps laughing at?
), this ultimate song and dance man is clearly the inspiration for Channing Tatums Burt Gurney.
That is most obviously what theHail, Caesar!number is referencing.
We imagine that a classical Hollywood old schooler like George Cukor had this problem multiple times over the years.
The singing cowboy trope was a regular of the gentler Westerns of yesteryear.
Still, Rogers was from Ohio while Autry, like Doyle, was 100 percent authentically Texan.
During the early 40s, she was the highest paid entertainer in Hollywood.
Hollywood Screenwriters Are Communists!
Giving her interviews from bed and under the covers, Young hid her pregnancy as best she could.
At this point, the daughter was transferred to the St. Elizabeths orphanage outside of California.
that she was adopting this randomly lucky girl.
Young wouldnt admit the whole thing until her 1999 authorized biography.
This off-the-cuff joke is in reference to an actual (but untrue) rumor regarding Clark Gable.
Afterward, he and MGM had an executive take the fall, claiming Gable was in the passenger seat.
Its an amusingly morbid piece of gossip that makes for a great Coen Brothers joke.
Did Johansson Just Turn Into Lauren Bacall From To Have and Have Not?
It certainly turned Bogies head…
George Clooney is Charlton Heston Meets Cary Grant?
The hardest homage to place is exactly who George Clooneys Baird Whitlock is supposed to be.
But there are traces of at least two movie stars in the margins of his performance.
On the one hand, he is obviously overlapping with Charlton Hestons shtick.
However, I suspect there is a little bit of Cary Grant in the performance too.
Then again,Hail, Caesar!makes an excellent point about studio fixers in that system arranging optics…
