that NO ONE has caught the most obvious pun, at least to me, that I included in the story!
In Casablanca, the Head Police figure, played by Claude Rains, was named, Captain Louis Renault.
I didn't want to tread TOO heavily on any copyright toes, so I changed his name to Chief Inspector Dreyfus, and NO ONE caught what I considered to be the obvious reference to The Pink Panther!
I guess I was either too subtle or there aren't that many Panther fans here at Top Shelf.
Nevertheless, I am very pleased at the response to the story, and I thank everyone who read/commented/voted for it.
Hugs 'n stuff,
Catherine Linda Michel
Comments
Now, if you'd referred to...
Chief Inspector Dopler!
(If you've not seen Sleuth, staring Lawrence Olivier & Michael Caine - go directly to the nearest place you can find it and see said movie!)
Annette
Sorry, was not a huge Pink Panther fan... so I did miss it...
However, I did subsequently go out and purchase the DVD of Casablanca, which my wife and I then shared with my 14 year old son. He was a little bit uninterested in first, but got hooked fairly quickly.
Thanks for prompting me to add it to my movie collection, as I had said in my original comment, it was an inexplicable gap in my collection.
Hugs,
Kristy
Pink
Loved your story. I knew you were punishing us and the Dreyfus connection did not escape me. It just made the story that much more fun. :) Portia
Portia
pink pather
Dreyfus is a very common surname. So the reference likely didn't stick.
nobody.
Drefus and Renault
I thought you were referring to Captain Alfred Dreyfus.
FYI, Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was the wrongly accused, convicted (in 1894) and imprisoned on Devil"s Island for passing military secrets to the German Embassy. When evidence came out that it was another officer, a military court martial quickly whitewashed and acquitted the real traitor. It was only through a very public campaign led by Emile Zola that got Dreyfus pardoned and later exonerated (1906) and reinstated in the army; Dreyfus retired due to poor health but re-entered service at the outbreak of WWI and retired again after the First World War. His son was also an Army officer.
Now see the movie...
The Affaire was examined in the 1958 film, I Accuse!, a direct translation of the title given to Zola's famous letter, J'accuse! with Jose Ferrer playing Dreyfus and Anton Walbrook as Esterhazy, the real traitor. Walbrook also played the lead in the 1940 version of Gaslight. Ferrer gets a lot of things right in the film, that Dreyfus was not a particularly likeable guy, which was part of his trouble, and that anti-Semitism, although it played a role among his far-right detractors and enemies, was not endemic in the French military, as there were quite a few other Jewish/French officers who had distinguished careers in the French army while all this was going on. After many years spent in prison, Dreyfus was eventually reinstated and served honourably well past the normal age of retirement, volunteering for combat duty despite the fact that he'd been granted early retirement because of poor health caused by his lengthy incarceration on Devil's Island in then-French Guiana, eventually becoming an Officer of the Légion d'honneur, partly because of the injustice he'd suffered, but also because of his exemplary service on the front lines in WW-I.
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
I do this too
Sometimes I toss this kind of thing into stories too, and that is the problem with writing. You never know if it got a chuckle, or if you are the only one that sees the connection, or if it was so bad that no one wanted to admit getting it.
Do a pair called Lori Peters (thin, snickers a lot) and Sydney Greenway (overweight) telegraph anything about the characters to readers? Is something in a story called PlaHot DevIce at all funny to anyone? Who knows? But we can keep on amusing ourselves, right?
Hugs; Jan