Columbus Day

Today being a holiday, and there not being any particularly exciting movies on, it's time for another Lazy List Post. (Heck, there aren't even any major birthdays.) It's Columbus Day, which means any nmber of things:

Explorers. Quite a few biopics have been made about explorers. Columbus himself was the subject of one back in the late 1940s, and another pair on the 500th anniversary of his first voyage, in 1992. Marco Polo got one in the late 1930s, while Lewis and Clark were portrayed by Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston in 1955's The Far Horizons. As for fictitious explorers, you can see some Antarctic explorers in Dirigible.

Italian-Americans. One of the obvious stereotypes of Italian-Americans is as the Mob; see Little Caesar. There's also Italian-American food, such as spaghetti, although that's really Chinese, as was seen in The Adventures of Marco Polo. Spaghetti is rather interestingly mentioned as being new to America at the turn of the previous century in The Strawberry Blonde.

Leaf Peeping. Autumn Leaves isn't really about the autumn, and it's in black and white, so we wouldn't see the brilliant colors anyhow. Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound sems set at some point in autumn when Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman go picnicking, but only a week or so later, they face a heavy snowfall more indicative of winter. Besides, it too is in black and white. A better movie with the brilliant autumn colors would be Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry.