From horseheads to war paint
Ann Althouse wonders how those Mafioso managed to get that horse’s head into the bed with Jack Woltz:
In that scene in “The Godfather”… we just see the guy slowly waking up and finally noticing there’s a bleeding horse head in his bed. It’s great cinema. You never forget it. But what the hell kind of a heavy sleeper was Jack Woltz anyway? I’d love to see the missing part of the story, where guys holding a giant, dripping horse head open the bedroom door, walk across the room, peel back the covers ”” I guess they’d have to set the head down ”” put the head in the bed, gently replace the bed clothes, and sneak back out of there. All that time, Woltz is snoozing peacefully.
Well, I guess Althouse never slept with some of my bed companions, because if she had, she’d know there are a lot of sound sleepers in this world. It’s not necessarily a bad trait, especially if you want to make a statement, as did the guys in “The Godfather.”
Speaking of statements—the whole thing reminds me of the summer camp I went to as a child. The horses there were for riding (although not by me!), and mercifully they kept their heads on their bodies.
But at the camp we had an institution known as Color War. It had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the speed contests known as races. Every year, kids from the city came to the Berkshire establishment for the entire summer, and the attendees were divided into two competing factions that fought (in the metaphoric sense) the whole time for hegemony on land and lake. There were track meets, volleyball games, and war canoe demonstrations, and archery and tennis and singing competitions and battles on every camp front imaginable.
It was all very intense. One of the most exciting parts of the whole thing was the beginning (isn’t that often the case?), when Color War was said to “break”—meaning the entire camp was divided into two teams, and each camper learned what team she was on. This was always done in some surprise way on about the second week of camp. We knew it was coming, and the tension built and built. How would it happen this year? Could they outdo the last?
The Color War break I remember best—and one never to be surpassed—was the morning we all woke up to the usual grating sounds of a scratchy record playing reveille, and as we opened our sleepy eyes, each of us noticed that all the other girls in the bunk had paint on their faces (of course, we were each unaware of our own painted face). Some were bright green and some stark white, the colors of the camp and the colors and names of the teams. As we pointed, whooped, hollered, and raced to the single tiny mirror to see our own faces, we realized that Color War had broken and the teams had been announced.
We also realized that our counselors must have sneaked into the cabin in the middle of the night and painted us while we slept. This was exciting in a disturbing way. There was a sense of vague violation and, at least for me, the shock that I had completely slept through such a thing. Since I was not a heavy sleeper, I could not understand it; how could it be? But the undeniable evidence was there for all to see in my bright green face.
The painters must have had a light and deft touch, because there were several hundred girls at the camp that summer, and the report was that no one had woken up.
Who won that year? Can’t remember.
[NOTE: This comment at the Althouse thread is mean mean mean, but hysterical.]
[ADDENDUM: Another connection between movies, Al Pacino, and a horse’s head. But this one’s musical.]
The horse head was there when he first got in bed and Jack came in drunk.
Ole Jack Woltz could have been passed out drunk.
He passed out dreaming of a female midget wrestler.
On the theme of sound sleepers:
When I was in the Army, a group of 5 or 6 guys had been out drinking (I was not among them). One of the guys passed out immediately when they got back to the barracks. Then, someone in the group thought it would be a good idea to shave off one of the guy’s eyebrows. Shaved it clean off without the guy waking up. However, he wasn’t very happy when he woke up the next morning to discover one of his eyebrows was missing.
Then, when the First Sergeant addressed the entire company about the incident, he threatened to charge the prankster, if caught, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, with, I kid you not, defacing government property.
I don’t know what was more surreal. Seeing a guy with one eyebrow walking around the base, or knowing that the prankster would be charged with the crime of defacing government property for shaving off an eyebrow.
When none of the guys in the group would rat out the defacer of government property via eyebrow shaving, the First Sergeant was ready to bring them all up on charges. The Commanding Officer saw the injustice in that proposition and refused to go that far. So none of the guys were punished. While I always had a suspicion who I thought the guilty party was, I do not know with absolute certainty who the rogue eyebrow shaver was.
My guess is that Althouse doesn’t know how resourceful evil men really are. Wouldn’t be the first time for that naif.
As for you, neo, perhaps a bright green face is merely your real face from the planet Avatar. An alien being passing for human.
Yeah, and your little dog too!
Scott:
I can well believe it. When I served in the IDF, there was a persistent rumor that jaywalking could be ticketed as a “suicide attempt”, which in turn came under the heading of “damaging military property”.
(Since soldiers’ bodies were apparently IDF property under the law, and since losing IDF property was a crime, I used to ask, in all seriousness, if an IDF soldier could be prosecuted for going on a diet.)
Me, I treated it as an example of the law being far more detailed than it needed to be. And I did eventually see a soldier ticketed for jaywalking… with the ticket reading “crossed street while not in crosswalk”. So there.
cheers,
DiB
We were told in the Texas National Guard that getting a sunburn was a punishable offense, though I never remember seeing it done.
I have always assumed that the degenerate Hollywood producer was asleep with chemical assistance as was the fad in those days out there. Our worst army prank involved a self-important spec-5 who always lorded his job over the rest of us. One day, after he was returning from presenting his slide show in Japan, we had short-sheeted his bed after sprinkling the sheets with spider hair (itching powder) and exchanging the soap in the showers with fake blood soap which turned the victim scarlet after lathering. The screams were delicious revenge for an insufferable stuffed shirt. The horse head in the bed was only the mob’s brutal version of our annoyed response to an annoying person.
At the camp that my kids went to in Maine (youngest still goes, in fact), they call it “College Days,” and there are four teams rather than two, with the college names changing every year. But the funny part is that they always have a “fake break” a day or two before the real break. And when my son was a “super senior,” they did a fake fake break before the fake break. It was intentionally lame (they just stood there handing out sheets of paper and saying “College Days!”), prompting kids to sneer at them, “Worst fake break ever.” I don’t recall what the real fake break was.
Ann, Hon, Focus like a laser beam: It’s a ****ing STORY-MOVIE!!!!
I remember that scene well. Don’t we all? My biggest regret? Woltz had the perfect opportunity to use that old joke: “why the long face?”
I awoke a few weeks ago to my dog gnawing on a half eaten fish next to me in bed. Pet doors and living on a lake do have their downsides i suppose.
Often, Trooper York is a hoot.
Pssst — the plural of mafioso is mafiosi 🙂
all gone..
competition bad for the slaves…
so everyone gets a trophy and all moms are happy in a kind of more creepy version of stepford… (as they accept that their childrens trophy means something as they all do – which is what their masters tell them it means)
Meanwhile…
Police are trying to defuse a bomb that has been strapped to a teenage girl in Sydney’s exclusive Mosman
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/police-are-trying-to-defuse-a-bomb-that-has-been-strapped-to-a-teenage-girl-in-sydneys-exclusive-mosman/story-e6freuy9-1226107599334
i wonder what behaviorist impetus was the culprit in stimulating the perpetrators to this… (thinking left for a left world… )
Police have defused a bomb strapped to a teenage girl at a house in the wealthy Mosman suburb of Sydney. The drama began on Wednesday afternoon (local time) when an 18-year-old girl called police to alert them to the device. Police are reportedly treating the case an extortion attempt. Her parents were distraught according to police, and had not been allowed to speak to the girl. There were four specialist police officers in the house with the teenager, and the incident went on for over seven hours.
and the final touches on a supreme soviet with a third way model, is almost complete… what then comes next historically?
Another question is: How did they get the head in the first place ? Presumably they had to kill the horse first, then saw the head off, which would have required lifting the head (because cutting something lying on the ground is difficult). Considering the weight involved, I think the job would have required at least 4 people, and couldn’t have been done silently.
Love The Godfather.
I always figured Woltz probably went to bed so doped up he didn’t notice anything.
Either way, Johnny Fontaine got the part 🙂
I was gonna say what artiedodger did about the horse head. Good tie-in. Nimble and on-topic..errr.. target.