JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Messages
- 14,201
Hidden rooms are also of course an ever-popular feature in the movies. Not just gothic horrors or detective tales: think of all those prohibition sagas, where the sliding panel reveals a room filled with jazz-age party-people! The films were drawing on documented cases of fixtures and fittings used in the speakeasies but the gangsters were also clearly inspired by the movies in some of their flights of fancy.
Even before the main wave of US gangster pictures arrived, Fritz Lang was creating wonderful transformations of innocent cabarets into gambling hells and drug-dens. Mabuse the Gambler from 1922 has pretty much the whole apparatus you find in the Cagney pictures such as The Roaring Twenties. Now the cod-documentary which forms a part of that 1939 picture is still used by film-makers today when they want to illustrate Prohibition, despite the fact it was a Warner Brothers recreation. It's a hall of mirrors!
Of course we got there first. When the British Government belatedly clamped down on the scandal of cheap gin and limited its sale, the trade went underground. A famous Black Cat sign appeared on one London pavement. In fact it was large enough to house a person who dispensed gin in return for a penny. Not all our secret rooms were aristocrats' follies or Priest-holes! :shock:
Even before the main wave of US gangster pictures arrived, Fritz Lang was creating wonderful transformations of innocent cabarets into gambling hells and drug-dens. Mabuse the Gambler from 1922 has pretty much the whole apparatus you find in the Cagney pictures such as The Roaring Twenties. Now the cod-documentary which forms a part of that 1939 picture is still used by film-makers today when they want to illustrate Prohibition, despite the fact it was a Warner Brothers recreation. It's a hall of mirrors!
Of course we got there first. When the British Government belatedly clamped down on the scandal of cheap gin and limited its sale, the trade went underground. A famous Black Cat sign appeared on one London pavement. In fact it was large enough to house a person who dispensed gin in return for a penny. Not all our secret rooms were aristocrats' follies or Priest-holes! :shock: