There’s a story about Van Halen and M&M's. The band's tour rider was said to specify that a bowl of the candy always had to be waiting backstage with the brown pieces removed. If a single brown one wa...
“That explains what happened to the potatoes.” American moonshine, recycled tea leaves, black market chocolate, and a tunnel under the stove. In The Great Escape (1963), British and American WWII POW...
“Fiddle dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes says he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite.” -Scarlett O'Hara, Gone With the Wind (1939) Barbecue, toothpaste, and movie tie-ins. Over here at The Celluloid P...
"If I'd drunk that much lemonade I'd be sour for a week." When, in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), small-town, racily named ingenue Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton, center) sips lemonade at a ...
Goat Cheese, olives, onions, capers, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, rosemary, lavender—these are some of the simple, sunny ingredients that go into the zesty cuisine of Provence. In J...
In Hitchcock’s lush thriller, To Catch a Thief (1955), a cliff-side picnic lunch gets served up with equal measures of innuendo, elegance, and cheek....
In Pedro Almodovar's zippy comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), a series of coincidences and high drama involving a jilted actress, a "Mambo Taxi," a lost shoe, live chickens, duc...
This 1945 Academy Award winner for Best Picture is hardly an advertisement for drinking. A grittily realistic portrait of alcoholism, replete with eerie theremin music and hallucinatory visions of bat...
[Beginning next week, The Celluloid Pantry will take a short hiatus while Nora serves at the 2007 American Egg Board Fellow at The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. We will return May 22.] ] This past...
“You think it’s easy to run when you’re holding a banana the size of a canoe?” The year 1973 saw the release of two futuristic films making pointed commentary on the state of American food: Soylent G...
"Green mint, that's what the boy said." In the noir classic, The Big Clock (1948), the dizzying sting of a certain green cocktail sends New York crime magazine writer, George Stroud (Ray Milland, le...
“If my boy says he can eat fifty eggs, he can eat fifty eggs!” In the days surrounding Passover and Easter, more eggs are bought and consumed in this country than during any other season. In Cool Han...
What are you dreaming of? In How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), three fortune-hunting models, Pola (Marilyn Monroe, right), Schatze (Lauren Bacall, left), and Loco (Betty Grable, center), pool their ...
“A joke and a pickle for only a nickel.” In Crossing Delancey (1988), Izzy Grossman (Amy Irving, center) is caught somewhere between the two sides of this vibrant Lower East Side street. Weekdays are...
Secret Agent Derek Flint (James Coburn) is the kind of man who likes to unwind after a long day by stopping his pulse while lying rigid between two chairs, who travels to Moscow not to watch ballet, b...
A few weeks back, we did a round-up of movie mobsters and their odd culinary leanings. In the spirit of the high emotions and decade-sweeping montages that characterize the Oscars, we decided to put ...
“I had three or four before I came, but they’re wearing off—you know how that is.” In The Awful Truth (1937), nothing in the kitchen is quite what it seems, but everything’s served up in good fun. ...
One of the most romantic movies of all time, the champagne just flows in Casablanca (1942). Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart, left), the cynical proprietor of a stylish nightclub in Morocco during WWII,...
Men have come a long way in the kitchens of Hollywood. In the over-the-top romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959), Rock Hudson plays a slick and devious ladies’ man (Brad Allen) pretending to be an hones...
If you had to choose just one drink for all time, what would it be? For me, it wouldn’t be sweet vermouth. But in Groundhog Day (1993), disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray, right) choose...
Chinatown (1974) is a thirsty film. Private eye Jake “JJ” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) uncovers a water scandal in a drought-stricken 1930s Los Angeles, taking him from parched riverbeds to the lush, green...
The Canadian distiller, The Seagram Company Ltd, has a long and storied history with the American underworld. Back in the days of Prohibition, it became a major bootleg whiskey supplier to its dry sou...
What is it about movie mobsters and food? In Goodfellas (1990) it's Paulie's garlic (see our earlier post) and Henry's slow-simmered sauce, in The Godfather (1972), it's Clemenza's cannoli, and in The...
One of the smallest, most perfect Christmas scenes in cinema comes from a French war film that trancends boundaries of race, language, religion, and social class. In The Grand Illusion (France, 1937)...
[Beginning next week, The Celluloid Pantry will take a short hiatus while Nora spends the month as a writer-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation. We'll return December 12.] "You must never be rough...
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