I GIVE IT FOUR OUT OF FIVE STARS

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

Rating: ★★

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UK. 1967.

Crew

Director – Ken Russell, Screenplay – John McGrath, Based on the Novel by Len Deighton, Producer – Harry Saltzman, Photography – Billy Williams, Music – Richard Rodney Bennett, Music Conductor – Marcus Dods, Special Effects – Kit West, Makeup – Benny Royston & Freddie Williamson, Production Design – Syd Cain. Production Company – Jovera S.A.

Cast

Michael Caine (Harry Palmer), Karl Malden (Leo Newbigen), Ed Begley (General Midwinter), Francoise Dorleac (Anya), Oscar Homolka (Colonel Stok), Guy Doleman (Colonel Ross), Vladek Sheybal (Dr Eiwort), Milo Sperber (Basil)

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Plot

Secret agent Harry Palmer has quit MI5 and is now working not very successfully as a private detective. He receives a telephone call from a computer that gives him the cryptic assignment to deliver a flask of eggs to a Dr Kaarna in Helsinki. When he arrives, Harry finds that Kaarna has been murdered and in his place is Harry’s old friend, the American Leo Newbigen. Harry is forcibly recruited back by his old MI5 boss and told that the eggs contain a deadly virus. He is ordered to investigate the activities of an organization known as Crusade for Freedom. Travelling between Latvia, Moscow and Texas, Harry discovers that behind Crusade for Freedom is Texan oil billionaire General Midwinter who has harnessed a super-computer (his “billion dollar brain”) to plan a revolution in Latvia with the intent of bringing down the Soviet Union.

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When the James Bond films became a phenomenon in the mid-1960s, dozens of imitators followed. The most prolific of these were absurd comic spectacles such as the Matt Helm films with Dean Martin – The Silencers (1966), Murderers Row (1966), The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) – and the more amusing Our Man Flint films with James Coburn – Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967). There were a great many imitators in this comically silly vein. Amid these, there was a far less substantial body of serious spy films such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Deadly Affair (1967) and The Quiller Memorandum (1967).

The Harry Palmer films offered a marriage between the two approaches, casting Michael Caine as a cheeky bespectacled womanising Cockney spy but also placing him into a realistic milieu. Billion Dollar Brain was the third of the Harry Palmer films, following the non-genre The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966). (These were followed thirty years later by two made-for-cable follow-ups, Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in St Petersberg (1996), in which Michael Caine again reprised the role). The films were based on a series of books by Len Deighton, a writer who regularly specialises in spy fiction. (In an interesting piece of trivia, the spy hero who always narrates in the first person in the books was left unnamed by Len Deighton but was given the name of Harry Palmer in the films and this is something that the series of books have now come to be generically known as).

The Harry Palmer series was produced by Harry Saltzman, the co-producing partner with Albert R. Broccoli of all the James Bond films up until The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Saltzman developed an interest in creating a more realistic alternative to James Bond after hiring Len Deighton to write the initial (subsequently abandoned) script for From Russia with Love (1963). (Len Deighton also later wrote the script for the legendary unmade James Bond film Warhead).

Michael Caine as Harry Palmer

Billion Dollar Brain was also the second film to be directed by Ken Russell. Russell had previously made the obscure French Dressing (1963), as well a number of highly acclaimed tv plays and documentaries about various composers and artists for the BBC. Alas, Ken Russell is the wrong director for this type of spy thriller, which makes a virtue out of a more realistic milieu than the fantasy world of the Bond films.

The other Harry Palmer films scaled the extravagantly unreal excesses of the Bond films back to the tightly wound, real world espionage plotting as patented by John Le Carré. By contrast, Billion Dollar Brain is surely the Harry Palmer series’ equivalent of a Roger Moore era James Bond film. It is certainly the biggest budgeted of all the Harry Palmer films and sees the series trying to compete in the same arena as contemporary Bond films like Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), offering up huge sets, lavish action set-pieces and a mad super-villain.

You cannot deny that Billion Dollar Brain is visually an extremely impressive film. The Helsinki locations, which stand in both for themselves as well as Latvia and Moscow, are photographed with a widescreen flourish. There are some fine sets, particularly the huge control room that houses the title super-computer. The climactic scenes with racing steam trains, buzzing snowmobiles, missiles disguised in oil tankers and an army in white snow camouflage gear heading into action, before the tankers are shot down and swallowed up in a collapsing iceflow, is easily on a par with the production work for some of the Bond films of the same era. Certainly, Billion Dollar Brain is free of the schoolboyish smuttiness and lunatic excesses that characterized much of Ken Russell’s subsequent films, but it also has a giddy extravagance that the other Harry Palmer films do not.

Michael Caine with the titular Billion Dollar Brain

Where the film bogs down is in a plot where it is often not clear what is happening. Things seem to happen without reason – you are not sure why Karl Malden suddenly receives order to assassinate his girlfriend Francoise Dorleac; why Vladek Sheybal’s scientist decides to kill himself; or why the Latvian rebels are raiding Soviet trucks (in scenes that seem mounted by Ken Russell as a slapstick caper). These are eventually explained but up until the point they are you have the feeling of being inside a giant juggernaut, moving from location to location and operating on a set of rules that are never communicated to the audience.

Most noticeably, the computer that heavily features, is even referred to in the title, is of little relevance to the film. There is an impressive opening – with it calling Michael Caine in the middle of the night, giving him an assignment and asking him to make Yes/No responses. While it seems clear that the filmmakers were trying to appropriate elements from the Space Age, the computer never actually does anything. All of its operations are simple substitutions for standard spy antics – issuing orders, filing information. It is never harnessed for extra computational power and certainly comes nowhere near the science-fictional artificial intelligence that the publicity machine tried to pump it up into being. Nor is it ever explained how the machine is crucial to General Midwinter’s plan to overthrow the Soviet Union.

Michael Caine never managed to look more devilishly sexy than he was in the Harry Palmer films, outfitted in an unappealing set of horn rim glasses while drifting through the spectacle with cheerful Cockney cheekiness. Although, amidst all the spectacle of the latter half, Caine’s playing gets lost – unlike the other Harry Palmer films, he plays a distinct supporting part to the show. Ed Begley [Sr] gives an OTT performance as General Midwinter, something that seems to be trying to be coming close to a Bond villain, where he is serviced by some amusingly well written speeches. Oscar Homolka steals much of the film with his sly performance as an unexpectedly friendly Russian general. In the before-they-were-famous category, one can see a young Donald Sutherland in a role as a computer technician who issues a warning into a telephone and Susan George as a Russian girl on the train.

(l to r) Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) and Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden)

The look of the bespectacled Cockney spy was later borrowed by Michael Myers in his spy film spoof Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) and sequels. In a nice touch, Michael Caine was cast as Austin Powers’ father in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002). One of the running gags in Austin Powers was of people standing or placing objects in front of others when they are naked, although you can see that this was actually patented here with Michael Caine standing in various convenient positions to hide Francoise Dorleac’s nudity during the bathhouse scenes.

The only other Len Deighton work of genre note adapted to the screen was the tv mini-series SS-GB (2017) based on his 1978 novel, an alternate history detective story set in an England that is occupied by Nazis after they won World War II. There was also the non-genre tv mini-series Game, Set, and Match (1988), based on Deighton’s Bernard Samson series of spy novels. The only other film work Deighton was involved with is as producer of the musical satire Oh, What a Lovely War! (1969) but he was so dissatisfied with the process that he had his name removed.

Ken Russell’s other films of genre interest are:– the historical witch persecution film The Devils (1971); the deranged adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975); the mind-bending sf film Altered States (1980); the psycho-sexual thriller Crimes of Passion (1984); Gothic (1986), centred around the events leading up to the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s writing Frankenstein; the campy Bram Stoker adaptation The Lair of the White Worm (1988); Mindbender (1996), a biopic of the fake psychic Uri Geller; The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002), Russell’s demented home movie take on Edgar Allan Poe; and an episode of the horror anthology Trapped Ashes (2006).

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Trailer here 

Director: Ken Russell

Actors: Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Ed Begley, Francoise Dorleac, Oscar Homolka, Guy Doleman, Vladek Sheybal

Category: Science Fiction

Themes: Spy Films, Super-Computers, Artificial Intelligence, Communism and the Cold War, Film Series and Sequels, Films of 1967

MORE VIDEOS:

'Caine Below Zero' - the making of Billion Dollar Brain
HarryPalmerMovieSite
A featurette/short 'making of' documentary about the Harry Palmer movie 'Billion Dollar Brain' of 1967 starring Michael Caine. The colour of the 16 mm film was very red so it has been changed into b & w. 


The Bafta winning and multi-Oscar nominated British composer Richard Rodney Bennett created a suitably eerie soundtrack for this 1967 Ken Russell take on the harry palmer spy franchise. In this - the third installment in the harry palmer series - michael caine finds himself in the icy wastes of finland, caught up in the machinations of a deranged ant-communist texan billionaire General Midwinter (played superbly by Ed Begley) intent upon destroying the soviet union by invading latvia with his huge private army. The Soviets are out to foil Midwinter's crazy plans however in the shape of the beautiful - and deadly- spy 'Anya', played by Francois Dorleac, who's last movie this would be before her tragic death only a month later in a car accident .

After producing the first two Harry Palmer movies to provide a more realistic, intellectual alternative to his cartoonish James Bond series, producer Harry Saltzman "Bonded" it up for this third entry after THE IPCRESS FILE and FUNERAL IN BERLIN. Although a troubled production with BIG SLEEP-level plot complications and an unlikely director in arthouse favorite Ken Russell, it's considered the liveliest of the Palmer series. Magnetic leading lady Francoise Dorleac (Catherine Deneuve's sister) was killed in an car accident soon after filming completed. As always, find more great cinematic classics at http://www.trailersfromhell.com







FILM STILLS BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN

 ALTERNATIVE TRAILER 



A short clip from the movie 'Billion Dollar Brain'. It shows the operation of a Honeywell H200 cmputer from the mid 1960s. You would turn on AC, wait for all the cooling fans to spin up, clear core, mounot several 1/2 inch tapes, load the card reader and then you are ready to compute. I maintained and programmed computers like this from 1965 onward.
This is the first computer I ever worked on. I learned how to install and maintain a system like this back in 1965. It had 24K characters of memory, several tape drives, a card reader and a line printer. Random access storage devices were still a few years away for this model.

THE MOVIE EDGAR J HOOVER KILLED

The President's Analyst is an American satirical comedy film written and directed by Ted Flicker, starring James Coburn, with cinematography by William A. Fraker, and a musical score by Lalo Schifrin. The film has elements of political satire and science fiction, including themes concerning modern ethics and privacy, specifically regarding the intrusion of the telecommunications monopoly, working with the US Government, into the private lives of the country's citizens. The film was released theatrically on December 21, 1967. Although initially not a commercial success, the film was reviewed favorably, eventually achieving cult film recognition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_President%27s_Analyst

Psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is chosen by the US Government to act as the President’s top-secret personal psychoanalyst, from a referral by Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), a Central Enquiries Agency (CEA) assassin who vetted Schaefer while undergoing his own psychoanalysis. The decision to choose Schaefer is against the advice of Henry Lux (Walter Burke), the under-five-foot-six-inch director of the all-male Federal Bureau of Regulation (FBR). ("Lux", like "Hoover", was once a famous make of vacuum cleaner.) Schaefer is given a home in affluent Georgetown, and assigned a comfortable office connected to the White House by a secret tunnel. From this location he is to be on-call at all hours, to fit the President's hectic schedule.

However, the President's Analyst has a unique problem: there is no one he himself can talk to about the President's ultra-top-secret and personal problems. As he steadily becomes overwhelmed by stress, Schaefer begins to feel that he is being watched everywhere until he becomes clinically paranoid; he even suspects his sweet girlfriend Nan (Joan Delaney) of spying on him as an agent of the CEA. All of Schaefer's paranoid suspicions eventually turn out to be true. Still worse, Schaefer has a habit of talking in his sleep.[3]

Schaefer goes on the run with the help of a "typical" American family who defend him against foreign agents attempting to kidnap him off the street. He escapes with the help of a hippie tribe, led by the "Old Wrangler" (Barry McGuire), as spies from many nations attempt to kidnap him for the secret information the President has confided to him. Meanwhile, agents from the FBR seek him out on orders to '"liquidate" him as a national security risk. Eventually, Schaefer is found and kidnapped by Canadian Secret Service agents masquerading as a British pop group. Schaefer is rescued from the Canadians and an FBR assassin by Kropotkin (Severn Darden), a Russian KGB agent who intends to spirit him away to the Soviet Union. Kropotkin has second thoughts about his plan, following a psychoanalysis session with the doctor during which Kropotkin begins to come to terms with his unrealized hatred of his KGB-chief father. Now feeling he needs the good doctor's help to continue his self-analysis, he instead returns him to US soil.

Kropotkin arranges a pickup with his trusted CEA colleague Don Masters, but Schaefer is kidnapped again, this time by TPC (The Phone Company), a far more insidious organization than the FBR or KGB, which had been secretly observing him. Taken to TPC headquarters in New Jersey, he is introduced to its leader (Pat Harrington, Jr.), who wants Schaefer's help in carrying out their plan for world domination. As the TPC leader makes his presentation, a camera closeup reveals electronic cables connected to one of his feet, revealing that he is actually an animatronic robot.

TPC has developed a "modern electronic miracle", the Cerebrum Communicator (CC), a microelectronic device that can communicate wirelessly with any other CC in the world. Once implanted in the brain, the user need only think of the phone number of the person they wish to reach, and they are instantly connected, thus eliminating the need for The Phone Company's massive and expensive-to-maintain wired infrastructure. For this to work, every human being will be assigned a number instead of a name, and have the CC prenatally implanted. Schaefer is "requested" to assist the TPC scheme by blackmailing the President into pushing through the required legislation.

Masters and Kropotkin use their superspy abilities to come to Schaefer's rescue. They hand Schaefer an M16 rifle that Schaefer gleefully uses on The Phone Company's security staff. The trio emerge victorious from the ensuing bloodbath, but months later, as Schaefer and his spy friends are enjoying a Christmas reunion, animatronic executives from TPC are seen look on approvingly at a secret monitor, while "Joy to the World" plays in the background.
Cast[edit]

James Coburn as Dr. Sidney Schaefer
Godfrey Cambridge as Don Masters
Severn Darden as V. I. Kydor Kropotkin
Joan Delaney as Nan Butler
Pat Harrington, Jr. as Arlington Hewes
Barry McGuire as Old Wrangler
Jill Banner as Snow White
Eduard Franz as Ethan Allan Cocket
Walter Burke as Henry Lux
Will Geer as Dr. Lee Evan
William Daniels as Wynn Quantrill
Joan Darling as Jeff Quantrill
Sheldon Collins as Bing Quantrill
Arte Johnson as Sullivan
Martin Horsey as 1st Puddlian


FILM
Its Prophetic Own: The President’s Analyst
Published 12 years ago June 6, 2008 By Vadim Rizov


Forty-one years down the line, and I think The President’s Analyst has aged slightly better than The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer’s classic of prototypical American paranoia anticipated (or seemed to anticipate) the Kennedy assassination freakily enough to necessitate its withdrawal immediately afterwards, but The President’s Analyst never bothered anyone besides Hoover’s F.B.I., who showed up knocking at Robert Evans’ office to demand cessation of production, then bugged his phones in revenge when he didn’t. To most, it didn’t seem like anything more than amiable, non-threatening satire. Big mistake: as anti-corporate a film as Gremlins (the alleged Christmas family comedy which ended in the trashing of a department store under red and green flashing lights), The President’s Analyst evaded attention by tackling a target (corporate greed) way before it was fashionable. What might have seemed like a cop-out in the anti-LBJ/Vietnam years now seems dead-on.

There’s a good bit of tedious spadework required to get there: the first half-hour of The President’s Analyst is as lame as a contemporary SNL sketch, extending one joke too far. Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is the last word in au courant psychiatry, c. 1967, banging a gong between sessions to clear his mind, demonstrating his up-to-dateness by being comfortable with every last sculpture in the Whitney. (Coburn being Coburn, he’s not entirely on-board: he wipes his eyes in discreet disgust when his patients aren’t looking.) Chosen as the President’s personal shrink (writer/director Theodore J. Flicker wisely avoids showing his fictional chief—a clue as to which way the misdirection is headed), Coburn loses it bit by bit: first from the flashing red lights that go off at any time and place to announce the president’s in need of him, then when he starts noticing all the spies around him. Like the old joke goes, he isn’t paranoid: everyone really is out to get him.

The first half-hour dabbles in mild paranoia and oh-those-crazy-agencies jokes: the “FBR” and “CEA,” respectively. (The stand-out is a serious monologue, delivered directly to the camera, from CEA agent Don Masters (Godfrey Cambridge) on “the day I learned about niggers”—delivered straight to the camera, beating Medium Cool to the punch by two years.) Things take a sudden turn for excellence when Coburn makes a run for it—first hiding out with a couple of proud New Jersey suburbanites (William Daniels and Joan Darling) who proudly announce themselves as good liberals: “We’re for civil rights. We’ve done weekend picketing.” (So much for the same year’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner changing everything.) Then it’s off with a hippie band—all the while being pursued by seemingly every Cold War pawn in the book, including the competing American agencies.

This is where the twist comes: this is a movie in which every government agency is ultimately ineffectual, and everyone seems to know it besides the agency bosses. The Soviet agent, one Kropotkin (Severn Darden), is on BFF terms with Masters, and the two effectively team up to save Coburn. Ideology? Forget about it, shrugs Kropotkin: “Every day your country moves closer to socialism and mine moves closer to capitalism.” It hasn’t quite worked out that way, at least the former part, but it’s as appropriately cynical a contemporary response as any. Coburn manages to turn the tables on his would-be Soviet captor through rote psychoanalysis (“All my life I’ve been miserably unhappy,” Kropotkin marvels, “but I always thought it was my Russian soul”); counter-culture and psychedelia will save the world. All forces bond together, finally, against the ultimate enemy: The Phone Company.

It would, perhaps, be irresponsible to suggest that corporate greed is responsible for 100% of the ills of daily life. But it’s tempting: walking out of a screening of Michael Clayton, I heard one man tell his viewing companion, “Things like that happen every day and we don’t even know about it.” I doubt there’s as many contract killers in Westchester County as either he or Tony Gilroy thinks—but it’s tempting, and who knows. The finale of The President’s Analyst puts all the blame there: it suggests, quite literally, that America is run by a bunch of soulless corporate robots. And I can’t say I disagree. Forty-one years late, The President’s Analyst has come into its prophetic own.

Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Reeler, Nerve, and, oddly enough, Salt Lake City Weekly.
https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/its-prophetic-own-the-presidents-analyst/


Murder of a Movie-How J. Edgar Hoover Killed "The President's Analyst" 

Bayside Productions Trailer for our new documentary about comedy director Ted Flicker.

A in-depth behind the scenes documentary about all the problems director Ted Flicker ran into making his 60's satire, 'The President's Analyst' The film, Ted and the studio got into trouble with the FBI over how bureau personnel were portrayed-especially J. Edgar Hoover. And after Flicker defied the studio execs and Hoover he got into big trouble and was blacklisted for a while. He switched to TV and created 'The 'Barney Miller Show', got rich and left LA for Santa Fe where he created the third act of his creative career. James Coburn stars. David Ewing director /editor.

One of most charming and clever political satires of the '60s almost didn't make it to the screen intact. Director Theodore J. Flicker's background in improv comedy provides cohesion to a wild scenario that pissed off everybody from the CIA to the FBI. James Coburn spoofs his Our Man Flint image as a paranoid psychiatrist who ends up battling Our Real Enemy - The Phone Company. http://www.trailersfromhell.com


THIS TRAILER IS THE LINK TO THE FULL LENGTH MOVIE
The President's Analyst is James Coburn, whose position makes him privy to any number of delicate government secrets. Thus Coburn becomes a most desirable prize for several secret-agent organizations, including the CEA and the FBR (we know who these folks are really supposed to be, even though the phony names were crudely dubbed onto the soundtrack after the film was completed). When Coburn becomes expendable, he finds a pair of strong allies in the form of likeable political assassin Godfrey Cambridge and gay Soviet spy Severn Darden. The main plot involves an insidious, unnamed concern that wishes to harness Coburn's talents in order to brainwash the president — and everyone else in America — into submission. The President's Analyst is a terrific, on-target satire of virtually every sacred cow of the late 1960s, the satire was so potent, in fact, that when the NBC network broadcast the film in the early 1970s, it was compelled to remove the picture's punchline.



SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-presidents-analyst-is-strange-gem.html

The President’s Analyst Is a Strange Gem of a Film
I

In 1967, an odd little film was released: The President’s Analyst. It stars James Coburn as the title character, also known as Dr Sidney Schaefer. It’s a reasonably big budget film, released through Paramount Pictures. Like a number of other films at the time, it used an actual band, Clear Light, performing two of their songs in situ. The most notable one, “Inner Manipulations” (by Barry McGuire and Paul Potash), is used for perhaps the funniest segment in the film.

The President’s Analyst was the feature film directorial debut of Theodore J Flicker. He is best known today as the co-creator of Barney Miller. This was early in his career, however. But he was hardly a novice — having directed a number of television shows. The film also represented his first solo effort as a writer. Previously, he had co-written The Troublemaker (1964) with Buck Henry, and the Elvis vehicle, Spinout (1966), with another noted comedy writer, George Kirgo. So it isn’t too surprising that he would manage to attract James Coburn and a major studio for an outrageous and politically daring script.

It’s vaguely reminiscent of one of my all time favorites, They Might Be Giants (1971). And just like that film, The President’s Analyst has a feel for the times: we might be on the brink of nuclear annihilation, then again, the world itself might just be the opium dream of some Greenwich Village hippy.

As a viewer, you’ve just got to let the film be. What Bringing Up Baby was to people in the late 1930s, The President’s Analyst was to filmgoers three decades later. And for us today, both films retain their sense of barely contained chaos.

The PlotSidney is a successful New York psychiatrist. But the president needs him. The film is careful to point out that the president has no notable neuroses; he just needs someone to talk to who doesn’t expect anything from him. This is a very exciting opportunity for Sidney. But it sours quickly. He’s caught between the FBR and the CEA. The FBR doesn’t like him, his modern ways, or his girlfriend (Joan Delaney). The CEA is defending him as much as it can.

(The film was shot with the two agencies being the FBI and the CIA, but Paramount head Robert Evans was apparently visited by FBI agents who told him they weren’t happy about the film. As a result, “FBR” was looped for “FBI” in post-production, as was “CEA” for “CIA.” Doubtlessly, the worse treatment given to the FBI in the film was a jab at J Edgar Hoover, who was still heading the agency.)

Quickly, the job wears on Sidney. His girlfriend is forced to move out because he talks in his sleep. What’s more, for national security reasons, he can’t have his own analyst. He feels trapped. And it only gets worse.

We never see the president, but we see the same exact shot of Sidney leaving their meeting room. The first time, Sidney looks like a man who has just conquered the world. But with each exit, Sidney looks worse and worse. When not meeting with the president, he sees spies everywhere. Whether they are real or not is unclear. We do, however, find out that Sydney’s girlfriend is a spy. Otherwise, what’s really going on hardly matters. Eventually, Sydney snaps.

Sydney’s Escape

He sneaks into a White House tour and escapes with a family at the tour, the Quantrills, by telling them that the president sends out emissaries to talk with regular Americans to find out what they really think. So soon, he is five hours, ten minutes, and 51 seconds away in a New Jersey suburb. The mother (Joan Darling) soon leaves for a karate class, so Sidney has a drink with the father (William Daniels) who tells him with some pride that they sponsored the first “negro” family in their subdivision (actually, something to be at least modestly proud of given the time). But it turns out that the family is what you might call left-wing radicals, very concerned about right-wing extremists.

Meanwhile, all the governments of the world know that the president’s analyst has escaped and they are keen to get their hands on him and find out what he knows. As a result, the FBR sets out to find and kill him. The CEA sets out to find and bring him back. But barring that, they too will kill him.
Everyone Wants Sydney

After going out to dinner with Quantrills, a number of spies come after Sydney. But Mrs Quantrill easily dispatches two them with her karate, and Mr Quantrill blows away two others with a calm lethalness that would make Paul Kersey jealous. Sidney runs away and hooks up with hippy band.

The following 20 minutes may well have been the inspiration for The Pink Panther Strikes Again where Dreyfus blackmails the nations of the world into killing Clouseau. One spy takes out another as he is just about to kidnap (or kill) the president’s analyst. Finally, Sydney is captured by Soviet spy Kropotkin (Severn Darden). But Sydney uses his psychiatric knowledge to get the spy to defect so that they can continue his analysis.
Enter: The Real Villain
The President’s Analyst gets steadily more bizarre as it goes on. But if you just let it take you where it will, I don’t see how you can help but enjoy it.

But before he can meet up with CEA agent Masters (Godfrey Cambridge), Sydney is kidnapped by what we finally learn is the real power in the world: TPC — The Phone Company.

The Phone Company, which is run by robots that look like humans, want to blackmail the president so that he will push through a law mandating that everyone receive a number and a Cerebrum Communicator (CC) implanted in everyone’s brain. This will greatly reduce the costs of The Phone Company, by removing all that old fashioned infrastructure. But Kropotkin and Masters save Sydney.

Some time later, it’s Christmas. Sydney and his girlfriend (who turns out to have been a CEA agent) welcome their friends Kropotkin (who never defected, and is now head of the foreign section) and Masters. They discuss the president’s meeting with The Phone Company to provide better service at lower prices. Then the camera pulls back and we see the scene through a computer monitor, which is being watched by a group of happy TPC automatons.

The President’s Analyst Analysis?

There are lots of ways to look at The President’s Analyst. The best is probably just as a romp. And it is quite a fun — and funny — one.

But there are some serious things even on the surface of the film. At one point, Kropotkin points out that governments don’t matter, “This isn’t a case of world struggle between two divergent ideologies or different economic systems. Every day, your country becomes more socialist, my country becomes more capitalist. Pretty soon, we’ll meet in the middle and join hands.” But that idea is woven into the fabric of the film too. For example, even the United Kingdom wants to kidnap Sydney, despite saying that the two countries are friends.

One thing that may not be so clear to younger viewers is just how much people did hate The Phone Company. Until 1984, Bell System was it. It had a monopoly. And despite being regulated by the government as a result, service was terrible and prices were high. I remember when I was ten, making some very short long-distance calls to get comic book catalogs. In some cases, the cost was 25¢ per minute. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $1.24!

So the film doubtless resonated with a lot of people when it said, “Forget the Soviet Union, it’s The Phone Company that you should fear!” It was just frosting to portray it as being run by automatons like Great Moments with Mr Lincoln at Disneyland. I remember reading some place that the producer, Stanley Rubin, said he figured that the FBI bugged him ever since — and probably The Phone Company too. (I can find no reference to this, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream it.)


Technical Thoughts

The film is really well made — professional from top to bottom. It’s also well planned. There’s one crane shot that results in a very funny sight gag. It’s beautiful to watch. It’s shot in 2.35:1 Technicolor.

The one downside is that it doesn’t use the widescreen as much as it could. Director Flicker’s background was in television. The camera operator, David Walsh, had very little experience — but he went on to become a great cinematographer — of particular note, he lit Cleopatra Jones (1973). And the cinematographer, William A Fraker — who also had a great career, including The Killer Inside Me (1976) — had mostly television experience up to that point. I’ve never seen the film panned and scanned, but I suspect it works pretty well.

Also of note is the editing by Stuart H Pappé. The President’s Analyst was one of his first films. But he went on to do such notable films as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), The Wanderers (1979), and George of the Jungle (1997). The film has a wonderful ebb and flow — never quite spinning off into insanity nor slowing to the point of boredom.

The incidental music by Lalo Schifrin is used sparingly — but well. It’s used almost exclusively for the action sequences and as sweetening to heighten Sydney’s sense of paranoia. But interestingly, there is no music used for the final action sequence. Regardless, when the music is there it is compelling — even on its own. That’s especially true of the credit music, despite it being almost Mickey Moused.

Acting

Finally, this film could have been a disaster if it didn’t have such a great cast. I’m not a big fan of James Coburn. He just isn’t that interesting. Yet he’s just perfect here. For one thing, he gets to have some fun over-playing the part while still being believable. But more than that, he’s surrounded by a great supporting cast.

Godfrey Cambridge and Severn Darden are comedic gold as the two protagonist spies. Joan Darling doesn’t get a lot to do, but she’s very funny doing it. William Daniels is hilarious and believable as the gun-toting, badass liberal. I could see a whole film built around him. Will Geer makes a brief appearance as Sydney’s analyst. Walter Burke is brilliant as the constantly disgruntled head of the FBR and J Edgar Hoover stand-in. Eduard Franz makes a good counterpart to him, even if his role isn’t as good. And most of all there is Pat Harrington as the face of The Phone Company. It’s easy to forget that he isn’t animatronic.
Final Thoughts

I didn’t like The President’s Analyst that much the first time I saw it. But it was one of those films that grew on me as I thought back on it. And my second and third viewings improved my appreciation of it. I’ve now seen it a half dozen times and it still works for me. But it isn’t a film that will be forced into a genre; you just have to accept it as it is. And that is despite the fact that the film is, in many ways, a pretty standard story: innocent man is plucked from his comfortable life, chased by assassins, and finally gets his life back. It may just be that the film gets steadily more bizarre as it goes on. But if you just let it take you where it will, I don’t see how you can help but enjoy it.
Technical Information

Information about the movie itself:
Release date: December 1967
Length: 103 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Film: 35 mm Anamorphic Technicolor

I must provide my usual disclaimer: even the smallest of films involve Obviously, so many more people are involved in the making of a film. But here are some of the most important:
Director:
Producer: Stanley Rubin
Screenwriter: Theodore J Flicker
Cinematographers: William A Fraker
Editor: Stuart H Pappé
Composer: Lalo Schifrin (Songs by Clear Light featuring Barry McGuire)
Actors: James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, Pat Harrington, Walter Burke, and William Daniels

–Frank Moraes

https://psychotronicreview.com/comedies/presidents-analyst/
The President’s Analyst image cropped from image at Wikipedia. It is licensed under Fair Use.




The President’s Analyst (1967)
Rating: ★★★
USA. 1967.
Crew

Director/Screenplay – Theodore J. Flicker, Producer – Stanley Rubin, Photography – William A. Fraker, Music – Lalo Schifrin, Production Design – Pato Guzman. Production Company – Panpiper Productions.

Cast

James Coburn (Dr Sidney Schaefer), Godfrey Cambridge (Don Masters), Severn Darden (Kropotkin), Joan Delaney (Nan Butler), Pat Harrington (Arlington Hewes), Barry McGuire (Old Wrangler), James Gregory (President), William Daniels (Wynn Quantrill), Will Geer (Dr Lee-Evans), Jill Banner (Snow White)

Plot

Psychoanalyst Sidney Schaefer is selected by the Secret Service as a suitable candidate to become therapist to The President. However, once installed in Washington, Sidney is driven crazy by the obsession with security – the Secret Service refuse to allow him to spend the night with his girlfriend lest he talk in his sleep and give away state secrets. Unable to take the paranoia anymore, Sidney decides to run away. On the run, he is pursued by every international spy agency who all want to obtain the information in his head, by his own side who want to liquidate him as a security risk, and finally by the Telephone Company who want to enlist him in their scheme to implant micro-sized telephones inside the nation’s head.


The President’s Analyst was one of the better among the horde of mostly silly spy films that came out in the 1960s exploiting the success of the James Bond films. Where most of the other films played out a maximum of playboy innuendo and Swinging 60s giddiness, The President’s Analyst is one of the few among the spy fad that amounted to a sharp and biting satire of Cold War politics. (Star James Coburn had earlier also appeared in one of the more amusing of the silly Bond film copies – Our Man Flint (1966) and its sequel).

The film’s satire veers unevenly between the inspired and the silly. The initial paranoia scenes go on too long and the hippie interlude is dated and even a little sentimental today. The slightly bittersweet sequence where James Coburn analyses the childhood of Russian spy Severn Darden is too protracted and goes against the rest of the film’s grain. For the most part though, The President’s Analyst succeeds.

James Coburn and Joan Delaney on the run amid a host of conspiracies

There are many funny sequences that have an appealing bite – like those with the militant suburban liberal Quantrills – “We’ll disarm when the conservatives disarm” – and the end scenes with the Telephone Company and their particularly believable plans for implanting neural telephones (something that seems to have come close to unnervingly real post the revelations of Edward Snowden and the NSA or of companies like Google and Facebook tracking cellular communications). Director Theodore J. Flicker throws in one fabulously funny visual sequence where James Coburn and Jill Banner make out in a field, their position only designated by balloons above the grass, while unnoticed around them a whole ring of spies skulk and eliminate one another.

Director-writer Theodore J. Flicker is a filmmaker who should have had a greater career than he did. Flicker worked sporadically in television and his only other films of note are the revenge black comedy Up in the Cellar (1970) and the children’s fantasy film Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang (1979).


Trailer here 






Director: Theodore J. Flicker
Actors: James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, Severn Darden, James Gregory, William Daniels, Will Geer
Category: Science Fiction
Themes: Satire, Spy Films, Paranoia, Politics, Communism and the Cold War, Sinister Corporations, Films of 1967

https://www.moriareviews.com/sciencefiction/presidents-analyst-1967.htm
© Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2020


SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/before-prisoner-presidents-analyst.html

Blu-ray Review: The Bolshevik Trilogy: Three Films by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Flicker Alley’s smartly packaged Blu-ray release is your essential introduction to an overlooked master of early Russian cinema.

Published March 24, 2020 By Derek Smith


While Sergei Eistenstein’s montage theory shaped Russian cinema in the 1920s, other filmmakers—such as Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, and Kuleshov’s student, Vsevolod Pudovkin—had their own ideas about how editing could be deployed to maximum effect. Central to Pudovkin’s approach to cinema is his belief that “editing controls the psychological guidance of the spectator”—a quote that gets at the heart of his opposition to Eisenstein’s tendency to focus on the unified masses over individuals and create meaning through a dialectical collision of disparate images.

In Eisenstein’s films, these collectives typically stand in opposition to their capitalist, autocratic oppressors, while individual characters primarily function as emotional signifiers rather than fully fleshed-out human beings. By contrast, Pudovkin’s films focus more on characters’ inner turmoil before spiraling out toward an understanding of collective organization and action. Where Eisenstein’s scene construction is often fragmented, abundant in jarring juxtapositions, Pudovkin’s is more fluid and psychologically motivated, wholly dependent on the specific characters within a given scene.

Pudovkin’s debut film, Mother, is perhaps the greatest illustration of his application of montage. Like Eisenstein’s Strike, released a year before in 1925, Mother tells the story of a factory workers’ strike, but much of the film’s first half plays out through the perspective of a single family: the son (Nikolay Batalov) who’s swept up in the workers’ movement; the father (Aleksandr Chistyakov) who’s recruited by the ultra-nationalist group, the Black Hundreds, to help violently shutdown the factory strike; and the mother (Vera Baranovskaya) whose initial worries about her son’s revolutionary acts eventually turn to sympathy for the cause.

Through this family drama, we’re given a sense of the divide between the classes and the struggles of everyday working-class people, with the son first standing up to his drunken father for beating his mother and later being blamed for his father’s death following a fight between strikers and members of the Black Hundreds. Because Pudovkin filters much of the proceedings through the eyes of the son, this death and the fallout it causes with his mother carries strong emotional resonance. Yet, Pudovkin still effectively weaves this experience into the larger fabric of these revolutionary times, using this event as a symbolic fracturing of the family dynamic—a form of collateral damage on the path to building a new communist society.

Following the father’s death, Mother opens up to the larger sense of sociopolitical upheaval, presenting a sweeping condemnation of Tsarist Russia, from the callous capitalist businessman to corrupt policemen and cruel, indifferent judges who condemn the son with little to no evidence against him. These men only make brief appearances in the film, but they’re granted a striking psychological realism through an array of close-ups of expressive gestures—a policeman stroking his hand, a factory owner tapping a cigarette on a fancy case, a disinterested judge sketching a horse while the son’s case plays out.

These miniature portraits are starkly contrasted with Pudovkin’s more blatantly symbolic use of nature, which always stands in direct opposition to tyrannical power. Pastoral fields (the domain of the workers) are presented in all their idyllic glory, and in a stunning sequence late in the film, melting sheets of ice flow downstream, paralleling the movement of now-empowered workers as they furiously march in protest to free their unjustly jailed comrades.

Pudovkin’s use of nature is used even more explicitly in 1927’s The End of St. Petersburg, with the beauty of the Russian countryside pitted against the harsh architecture and polluting factories of St. Petersburg. Through parallel editing, Pudovkin lays bare a nation’s class inequities, with rural areas rife with starvation and poverty while the city is controlled by an affluent upper class that’s indifferent to this suffering. The clash of ideologies is made even more glaringly apparent here than in Mother, as images of chaos at the stock market and of greedy traders and businessmen are repeatedly juxtaposed with shots of people struggling to survive in the countryside and workers suffering through long work days and the senseless violence of war, which is shown to benefit only the war profiteers.

Like Mother, The End of St. Petersburg filters the historical and the political through the hardships of an unnamed peasant (Aleksandr Chistyakov). And the man’s journey from the countryside to a factory in the titular city and then to the battlefield anchors the sweeping revolutionary history of 1917 Russia through a single perspective, at once unique and representative of the experiences of many thousands of others at the time.

Pudovkin’s final entry in his “Bolshevik Trilogy,” 1928’s Storm Over Asia, is a bit of an outlier, not only in its injection of historical fiction, with imperialist British rulers in power in Russia, but also in its ethnographic study of the daily lives of ordinary Mongolian herders. The film is stylistically and narratively the most straightforward of the three, relying on rapid montage only a handful of times throughout. Pudovkin’s focus instead lies in exploring the bonds between poor Mongolians and Russians, and conveying the value of their cooperation in helping to overthrow their domineering foreign rulers.

Pudovkin again works from the minute to the epic, first plunging the viewer into the world of a poor Mongolian herder, Bair (Valéry Inkijinoff), before contrasting the gorgeous, bucolic landscape in which the man lives and the cooperative nature of his people with the racist, materialist, and exploitive actions of the British. In a way, Storm of Asia is less pro-Bolshevik than anti-imperialist, but its more global perspective offers insight into how the Bolsheviks saw Russia in relation to the rest of the international community at the time. It’s a fitting finale to a trilogy that sets out to illustrate the various reasons for embracing a particular ideology as well as a potent display of Pudovkin’s ability to merge his examinations of individual turmoil with pointed social and political commentary.
Image/Sound

Neither Mother nor The End of St. Petersburg were transferred from restored sources, and the flawed presentation of both films highlights the myriad challenges that need to be overcome in order to restore any but the most well-preserved silent films. Both films here are obviously presented in HD and the sharpness and detail of the image is far superior to prior transfers. But quite a bit of damage and debris is on consistent display throughout both films; there’s also a recurring flickering that begins to wear on the eyes after a while. Blacks very frequently appear closer to milky grays, and although both films are still very much watchable in this state, it’s clear that they could use a hefty polishing to return them to their former state of glory. Fortunately, the transfer of Storm of Asia is sourced from a brand new 2K remaster, scanned from a 35mm print, and the difference is night and day. Blacks are considerably inkier, finer details are visible throughout the frame, and while signs of dirt and debris remain visible, it’s negligible compared to the other two films included in the set.
Extras

Flicker Alley’s two-disc Blu-ray set is brimming with informative and engaging extras that help to contextualize all three films within the period of Russian history and cinema in which they were made. The two beefiest features are the audio commentaries on Mother and Storm Over Asia. The first, by Russian film historian and curator Peter Bagrov, touches on Pudovkin’s approach to articulating the empathy and humanism of Maxim Gorky’s novel. Bagrov’s discussion of Pudovkin’s aesthetic, and the ways he uses distance, camera angles, and lighting to convey his characters’ psychological complexity, is particularly effective. Most surprising is Bagrov’s argument that American continuity editing, especially that of D.W. Griffith, helped to shape Pudovkin’s aesthetic. Film historian Jan-Christopher Horak’s commentary for Storm Over Asia is noticeably drier, as it sounds as if he’s reading from a script verbatim, but he nonetheless offers some intriguing observations, namely on the effects that Stalin’s rule had on Russian experimental cinema of the 1920s, along with a plethora of information about Mongolian and Russia history that sheds light on certain aspects of the film.

Most enlightening of the remaining extras is the 10-minute “A Revolution in Five Moves,” which uses specific shots and scenes from the “Bolshevik Trilogy” to illustrate Pudovkin’s use of motifs, symbolism, contrast, parallelism, and simultaneity. The slightly shorter “Five Principles of Editing” is a nice companion piece, giving more precise definitions of these concepts and additional examples from within the three films. Clocking it at under two minutes a piece, both “Amateur Images of St. Petersburg” and “Notebooks of a Tourist” provide a layman’s perspective of life in 1920s Russia. Pudovkin’s slight but amusing 1925 short film Chess Fever is also included as is a booklet with an essay by film historian Amy Sargeant.

Overall
Consider Flicker Alley’s smartly packaged Blu-ray release of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “Bolshevik Trilogy” your essential introduction to an overlooked master of early Russian cinema.

Cast: Vera Baranovskaya, Nikolay Batalov, Aleksandr Chistyakov, Anna Zemtsova, Ivan Chuvelyov, Sergey Komarov, Valéry Inkijinoff, Viktor Tsoppi, Fyodor Ivanov, Boris Barnet Director: Vsevolod Pudovkin Screenwriter: Nathan Zarkhi, Osip Brik Distributor: Flicker Alley Running Time: 291 min Rating: NR Year: 1926-1928 Release Date: March 10, 2020 

Buy: Video

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/blu-ray-review-the-bolshevik-trilogy-three-films-by-vsevolod-pudovkin/

David Lowery’s The Green Knight, Starring Dev Patel, Gets Teaser Trailer

Today, A24 dropped the trailer for haunting mustache enthusiast David Lowery’s latest.

By Alexa Camp
 

Photo: A24

Jack of all trades and haunting mustache enthusiast David Lowery is currently in pre-production on the latest live-action adaptation of Peter Pan for Disney, which is bound to be full steam ahead now that The Green Knight is almost in the can. Today, A24 debuted the moody teaser trailer for the film, which stars Dev Patel as Sir Gawain on a quest to defeat the eponymous “tester of men.” Scored by Lowery’s longtime collaborator Daniel Hart, The Green Knight appears to have been shot and edited in the same minimalist mode of the filmmaker’s prior features, which include Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story. Though it’s not being billed as a horror film, it’s very easy to see from the one-and-a-half-minute clip how Lowery’s latest is of a piece with so many A24 horror films before it.

According to A24’s official description of the film:

An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men. Gawain contends with ghosts, giants, thieves, and schemers in what becomes a deeper journey to define his character and prove his worth in the eyes of his family and kingdom by facing the ultimate challenger. From visionary filmmaker David Lowery comes a fresh and bold spin on a classic tale from the knights of the round table

The Green Knight is written, directed, and edited by Lowery and also stars Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, and Barry Keoghan.

A24 will release The Green Knight this summer.



See the trailer below:

I AM A BIG FAN OF SIR GAWAIN THE GREEN KNIGHT MOVIES
NO MATTER HOW B GRADE

Theatrical trailer for the film Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Directed by Stephen Weeks and starring Miles O'Keeffe, Sean Connery, Trevor Howard, Emma Sutton and Peter Cushing.

1973 FULL MOVIE
 

Billie Eilish Drops Lush James Bond Theme Song “No Time to Die” The lush, darkly cinematic track feature an orchestral arrangement courtesy of Hans Zimmer and guitar from Johnny Marr.

By Alexa Camp



Photo: Interscope Records

On the heels of her historic Grammy wins, singer-songwriter Billie Eilish has unveiled “No Time to Die,” the theme song from the upcoming James Bond film of the same name. The song was produced by her brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas, and veteran knob-twirler Stephen Lipson. The lush, darkly cinematic track falls in line with past 007 themes, with an orchestral arrangement courtesy of Hans Zimmer and Matt Dunkley, and featuring guitar from Johnny Marr of the Smiths.

The 18-year-old Eilish, the youngest person and first woman to win the four main Grammy categories in the same year, is now the youngest artist to both write and record a Bond theme. She performed the song live for the first time at The Brit Awards on February 18.

GOOGLE DOODLE CELEBRATES BANH MI

WE CALL IT A SUBMARINE SANDWICH

Bánh mì - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Bánh_mì

‎History · ‎Ingredients of sandwich · ‎Varieties · ‎Notable vendors

Bánh mì or banh mi is the Vietnamese word for bread. In Vietnamese cuisine, it also refers to a type of baguette which is often split lengthwise and filled with various savory ingredients as a sandwich and served as a meal. Plain banh mi is also eaten as a staple food. Wikipedia

Main ingredients: Vietnamese baguette (also bánh mì)

Place of origin: Vietnam

Alternative names: Vietnamese sandwich

Invented: 1950s

Celebrating Banh Mi

Today’s Doodle celebrates the savory and satisfying Vietnamese street-food sandwich known as bánh mì, a smorgasbord of flavors that represents a true melting pot of cultures and ingredients alike. On this day in 2011, bánh mì was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Some accounts posit bánh mì’s humble beginnings in the late 1950s street stalls of Saigon’s noisy alleys, but an official origin story is yet to be verified. What is universally accepted about bánh mi’s history: its French inspiration, the staple baguette sandwich.

A traditional bánh mì consists of crispy and airy bread packed with a meat of choice (such as pork pâté, giò lụa, Vietnamese cold cuts, or meatballs), sweet, crunchy veggies and herbs (pickled radishes, carrots, and cilantro), a spread of mayonnaise or margarine, and savory soy sauce, finally topped with chili sauce or peppers. Voilà! By replacing European flavors with Vietnamese ingredients, a tangy and sweet while simultaneously spicy and salty takeaway food was born.

In current times, one can find countless spin-offs of the sandwich in street stands, markets, and restaurants across the world, from New York, to Seoul, to Saigon. Koreans often enjoy bánh mì’s stuffed with their signature bulgogi (barbeque beef) and kimchi. In the U.S., many popular recipes have traded the baguette with a brioche bun to create a miniaturized version: bánh mì sliders.

No matter the variation, you can relish the taste of cultures coming together!

The Origin of Hoagies, Grinders, Subs, Heroes, and Spuckies

Sub, hoagie, hero, grinder, spuckie, po' boy, wedge: here's why you call the footlong (or longer) sandwich whatever you do

BY SAM DEAN

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIK S. PETERSON

FEBRUARY 1, 2013

https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-origin-of-hoagies-grinders-subs-heroes-and-spuckies

We all know the origin story of sandwiches: the 18th-century Earl of Sandwich, a wise man named John, started asking his staff to serve him meat bookended with bread to make for quick meals. Rumors persist that he did this to facilitate all-day gambling sessions, but his modern-day ancestors insist he was just a busy guy.

But for Super Bowl weekend, we don't just care about plain old sandwiches. We want foot-long (or six-foot-long) meat- and cheese-stuffed flavor bombs, those super-sandwiches we call "subs." Or "hoagies," or "grinders," or "po' boys," or "spuckies," or, if you're from Yonkers, "wedges." It's just one genre of sandwich, really, so why all the names, and where did they come from?

Well, back before big brands and big chains steamrolled "local color" into variations on beige, there was room for every American city to come up with its own name for a full-loaf sandwich filled with cold cuts, and most areas with large Italian immigrant populations did just that. While some of the names' origins are pretty basic, myths have swarmed to these sandwiches like flies on honey--so here, in no particular order, are the facts and fictions of our favorite sandwich's names:


Sub: An abbreviation of "submarine sandwich," subs are called "subs" because they look like submarines. Simple as that.

But the best myth puts the ground zero of subbery in New London, CT, around World War II. The city (well, technically the town of Groton, across the river from the city proper) is home to the Navy's primary submarine base and a large shipbuilding yard, both of which were understandably bustling during the war. According to this story, the big sandwich itself was invented by an Italian shopkeeper named Benedetto Capaldo in New London, but was originally known as a "grinder." Once the sub yard started ordering 500 sandwiches a day from Capaldo to feed its workers, the sandwich became irrevocably associated with submersible boats.

A nice story, but the OED's first printed record of "submarine sandwich" dates to a January 1940 phone book for Wilmington, DE, where a restaurant was advertising "submarine sandwiches to take out." Seeing as how we didn't mobilize for WWII until two years later, that pretty much torpedoes the New London legend.

Grinder: You're most likely to find one of these in New England, though the more common "sub" has taken over most of the terrain. "Grinder" shares some flimsy nautical roots with the sub--some claim that it was named for "grinders," Italian-American slang for dockworkers (who were often sanding and grinding rusty hulls to repaint them)--but the more widely attested origin is about the sandiwch itself. Subs, with their Italian bread and piles of fixings, were harder to chew through than your typical ham and cheese on white bread. That toothsomeness got translated into "grinder," since that's what your teeth had to do to get through a bite.

A note for nitpickers: at certain points in New England grinder history, grinders have been hot, while subs stayed cold, but that's come and gone over the decades.

Hero: Native to New York, the hero has two main origin stories. First, there's the logical speculation that it's a warped pronunciation of "gyro," the Greek sandwich with spit-roasted meat. But the term is attested back to the late '40s, and Greek gyros only made a splash in American food culture in the '60s, and even that began in Chicago. And maybe more importantly, all of these sandwiches are essentially Italian creations. The odds that a New Yorker in the '40s would mistake a Greek establishment for an Italian one are approximately nil. The real hero's journey began with the wonderfully named Clementine Paddleworth, who probably coined the word in a food column for the New York Herald Tribune in 1936, since the sandwich was so large "you had to be a hero to eat it." Since the NYHT went belly-up in 1966, there aren't any searchable archives online, but an enterprising food historian out there could go check out Rutgers University's microfilm archive to pin this one down for good. Barry Popik, on OED contributor and general food word expert, traces the word back to a 1937 Lexicon of Trade Jargon published by the WPA, which describes "hero" as "armored car guards jargon" for a big sandwich. That throws a little doubt on the Paddleworth Hypothesis, since it's unlikely a bunch of armored car guards would just pick up words from the paper willy-nilly, but the underlying "gotta be a hero to eat it" is still a strong contender.


Hoagie: This is the home-grown Philadelphia term for the big Italian sandwich, and has picked up not one but four explanations for its origin. The first two, strangely mirroring the "sub" story, start at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The Yard was located on a chunk of land once known as Hog Island, so the workers there were accordingly called "hoggies." This was an early spelling of the local sandwich, and the story goes that the many Italian immigrant Navy Yard workers ate enough of them to get the thing named after themselves. Alternately, "hoagie" is said to come from "Hogan," in two different ways. First, it was a common Irish name, and became a nickname for the Irish immigrant Navy Yard workers, so like with "hoggie," they supposedly named it after themselves. Or, another story goes, a mug named Hogan asked a coworker who was always chowing down on delicious Italian sandwiches if he could start getting the lucky guy's wife to make an extra for him every day, and the name somehow stuck.

But considering that the Hog Island Navy Yard shut down in the '20s, and "hoagies" didn't start making the rounds in print until the '40s, that's fairly unlikely. I'll admit, it's weird that hoagies, subs, and grinders would all have apocryphal stories related to dockworkers, but the dates really don't line up on this one.

Instead, the real origin is more likely to go back to a jazz musician turned sandwich shop owner named Al De Palma. In the late '20s, he saw some fellow hepcats eating a sub, and commented to himself that you "had to be a hog" to eat a sandwich that big. So when he opened a sub shop during the Depression, he started calling his big sandwiches "hoggies," and eventually opened chains across the city. As for why "hoggie" turned to "hoagie," the best explanation out there is probably the Philadelphia accent itself. Ever heard those guys talk?


Po' Boys: The only strong contender for the true name of the sandwich outside of the Eastern Seaboard comes from New Orleans, where the sandwich goes by "po' boy," "po-boy," or the original, "poor boy." The best story about this name happens to be true, and it starts with a streetcar strike. In the summer of 1929, 1,100 New Orleans streetcar conductors and motormen went on strike, largely with the support of the city--when strikebreakers were sent in to bust picket lines and scab on the trolleys, a crowd of 10,000 New Orleanians gathered downtown to cheer on strikers as they burned the first scab-operated streetcar.

Two brothers named Bennie and Clovis Martin, Cajun Louisianians who used to work on the streetcars, sent a letter of support to the union pledging free meals to union members and their support "till hell freezes over." They followed through on their promise, giving out large sandwiches to any strikers that came by their shop, commenting to each other "here comes another poor boy" whenever one walked through the door. To maximize the food load, they worked with an Italian baker, John Gendusa, to come up with a rectangular sandwich loaf more efficient than the tapering baguette. As with the hoagie, the name then spread through the city as the Martins expanded their restaurant and stuck.

Etc.: Regional sandwich name microclimates abound, though the dominance of Subway is slowly grinding away at local specialties. In Southie (in Boston), you can order a "
spuckie" at the spa, short for spucadella, the name of an Italian roll. In Wisconsin, they go by "
garibaldis," named after a menu item at a local Italian restaurant (presumably named in honor of the hero of Italian unification). And there are plenty of shape names, like "
blimpie" (named after the Hoboken-based chain), "
torpedo," "
zeppelin" (found in Pennsylvania), and "
bomber" (near buffalo). And in parts of the upper Midwest, people call big sandwiches "
Dagwoods," after the famously hungry comic book character.

But the weirdest-sounding of all has to be "
wedge," which is only familiar to natives of Westchester County, NY, and Fairfield County, CT, the two counties directly north of New York City. Some sources group it in with the shape-names, based on a diagonal cut in the middle of the sandwich, or a wedge cut out of the top half to make more room for fillings, but the real story's probably the simplest on this list: "wedge" is just short for "sandwich," and comes from a Yonkers deli whose Italian owner got tired of saying the whole word.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what you call them, as long as you end up with a big sandwich in front of you (like one of these from our Ultimate Super Bowl Party Menu)--it's hard to say much of anything when you've got serious munching to do.

RELATED:
Some Americans Call Sandwiches Dagwoods
Having a Sandwich with the Earl of Sandwich