Got in a note from Terry Zobeck — who has Material of Substance lined up in my in-box, but you can’t always do the Deep Pure Text stuff. Terry has this piece of cinematic history to relate:
All that talk recently on the Mean Streets about the various connections of the film of The Maltese Falcon must have seeped into my subconscious.
A couple of weeks ago I was watching TCM and they had on John Wayne’s Big Jake, one of his pretty awful late period Westerns, a poor retread of the plot of the classic The Searchers.
Wayne’s grandson is kidnapped by a gang led by Richard Boone. Wayne, his sidekick and two sons — played woodenly by his real-life son Patrick and Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher — track down the gang.
The highlights of the film are the two scenes between Wayne and Boone. The final one concerns Boone opening the chest that supposedly contains the ransom money. Wayne tosses the key to the chest to Boone who picks it up and walks over to the chest. He looks down and asks, What’s in it?
The Duke replies: “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
Holy !&#@! I’m only half watching by this point, but this line certainly catches my attention. I give an appreciative chuckle and end up watching the big shoot ’em up.
Lousy film, but it had the class to steal a good line..
