Movie Myths: The High Hat

When I first saw Miller's Crossing I was impressed by the level of research needed for proper slang, especially vulgarities which wouldn't have made it into period books and films.  A friend of mine clued me in: "They made it all up."

Recently I've run into a couple of places where people claim the Coen Brothers invented the phrase "Giving me the high hat".

High hat as a noun used to describe a snob dates back to 1889.  High hat meaning self important dates back to 1923.  High hatting as a verb dates back to around that time as well.

Even the specific phrase "giving me the high hat" (the usual quote, but which isn't in the scene above) was established slang.  A quick search in archive.org gives:

"Or don’t you remember giving me the high hat?" - The Golden Spike aka Reefer Boy by Hal Ellson, 1952

"What’s the idea of your giving me the high hat that way?" - The Sound of the Trumpet by Grace Livingston Hill, 1943

Movie Myths: The Black Guy Dies First

I'm not one to fact-check jokes, but I've seen this one making the rounds again, relating to horror movies, and presented as serious social commentary.  A while back I even saw a university study trying to prove the point - it was pretty fundamentally flawed, as it counted how many Black character dies, not in what order.

Thanks to the power of the internet, mainly YouTube and Horrorpedia, this is pretty easy to check.  Of these major horror franchises:

• Alien
• Child's Play
• Friday the 13th
• Halloween
• Nightmare on Elm Street
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The only film to have a Black character to die first is Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and he was a survivor from part 3.  More Black guys are "final girls" than first kills - off the top of my head, Elm Street 3, Chainsaw 3, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and Child's Play 3.

If there was the same racial distribution as the US population, we'd expect to see around six Black characters die first.  Not that I'm defending horror movie casting decisions - the only thing worse than the undercasting of Black actors is the result when they actually are cast.

Movie Myths - O Fortuna and the Omen

Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it Again, Sam."  Charles Boyer never said "Come with me to the Casbah".  And O Fortuna from Carmina Burana, also know as the Omen theme -



was not in any of the Omen movies.  Instead, there was a kind of similar but not really original score by Jerry Goldsmith.  The vibe is similar, but you couldn't confuse the two.

In fact, unless you count Salo and Natural Born Killers (which I don't), the only horror feature it's ever been used in that I could find is 2002's miserable Thai film 999-999.  How did the piece become associated as a horror movie cliche, and specifically as the theme song of the antichrist?

Hard to say.  It's been used plenty of times in a non-horrific, dramatic context, probably most notably in Excalibur.  Like most of these kinds of things, the association probably comes from parody - commercials, comedy skits, etc.