Quote:
Originally Posted by khalleron
You guys remind me of that friend I took to see 'The Maltese Falcon' who kept laughing all the way through because 'it's so full of clichés'.
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Some people need some learnin' before they should be allowed to see a famous movie.
The filmmakers and Dashiell Hammett invented those clichés -- or perfected the ones they didn't invent. So did authors like Raymond Chandler. (Shout-out to Carroll John Daly, who is credited with writing the first hard-boiled detective story.)
In college, I once proudly showed a Raymond Chandler paperback to one of my friends. It was a newer edition with new cover art, but the cover was a tribute to pulp art. She laughed at it and said something about how it looked like trashy fiction or whatever. I tried to explain that this author is highly respected and now studied in universities, etc., etc., but I don't think she truly believed me.
I've heard that people who see the early Westerns (like the silent film
The Great Train Robbery) often have the same reactions. They see them as chock full of cowboy movie clichés. Those movies invented those clichés. (Today I learned that
The Great Train Robberywas made so long ago (1903) that they were not using the term "director" yet.)