The End

I hope nobody was thinking it was the end of this blog. When I was watching Dollar the other day, I noticed the card at the end of the movie was the following:



Now, I speak German, so I fairly quickly recognized the word as cognate to the German Schluß, meaning the end, never mind the fact that it came at the end of the movie. Obviously, for English-speakers, that Swedish end card is ripe for abuse. But it also got me to thinking of some other ending cards.



Fox cards from after 1953 would helpfully remind you that you had just watched a movie in Cinemascope. I seem to recall that a lot of the cards were not over footage of the film, but on a blue background, just like the opening cards that mentioned you were about to watch a Cinemascope movie. (I don't remember which movies did which, and thanks to some issues with my computer's DVD player having trouble recognizing multiple DVDs, I'm not about to look.) MGM's cards from around 1950 on had a lot of empty space like this, which would get filled up by the name of the movie, as if you don't remember what you just watched.



For some reason I was thinking the end of the Traveltalks shorts was more colorful. And that it said the end. My memory on this was obviously wrong. There are some other interesting ones out there such as William Castle's Strait-Jacket, which, being about an axe-murderer, has an appropriate one:



I remember the first time I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur noticing that it had a card reading "Finis". And then there were the Universal cards of the early 1930s (the era with the airplane going around the globe), telling us "A good cast is worth repeating". Unfortunately I couldn't find those either.