Another Tarantino Influence?

toplease.jpgWaded through To Please a Lady, a tedious 1950 romance about a race-car driver (Clark Cable) and a high-powered newspaper and radio columnist (Barbara Stanwyck), on the apparently mistaken notion that any movie with Stanwyck in it is worth watching. (Why is this turkey available on DVD while All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow unobtainable?) The basic thrust is that high-toned, full-of-herself Stanwyck is “just another dame who needs to be roughed up” by he-man Gable. And one slap across her elitist face, and she falls in love. But there is one cool sequence at a county fair where Gable is reduced to doing stunt driving. In addition to crashing through a wall of ice blocks with dynamite attached to his bumper, Gable also pilots his car through a sheet of fire with another stuntman laying flat on the hood attached by two straps—just like that “Ship’s mast” trick Zoe Bell does in Death Proof. OK, I’m reaching, but it was a long movie and my mind was wandering.

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