The most important datum to be taken from this film is that, in an eighth grade reading class, my friend, Chippy D'Amiano, read the word "Nowhere" aloud as "Now Here." Chippy was the kid whose essay on basketball began with the question, "Who, Why, When, Where, Plays Basketball?"
Moving right along, the second most important lesson to be learned from this film is that "Nowhere" is an anagram of "Erewhon", a novel written in 1872 by the New Zealander Samuel Butler. The novel was a satire of English society, somewhat like "Gulliver's Travels", and Butler described a fictional world in which artificial intelligence became so advanced that machines took a dominant role over human beings. Thus, ironically, the machines subjected themselves to Darwinian selection. Pretty cool, isn't it? The sins of the fathers and all that?
The movie. Yes, the movie. Well, it was released in 1945, it's about this charter pilot, Alan Curtis, who is hired to fly half a dozen suspicious characters to a resort in the middle of the desert. There are familiar faces among the passengers. We may note the presence of Jerome Cowan (aka Miles Archer); the succulent Evelyn Ankers, who is almost murdered during the flight, though it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to spoil her looks by killing her. Jack Holt is at the resort, an FBI agent, or so he claims. You may remember him from "They Were Expendable," as the Army General in the Philippines at the start of the war, whose lines there include, "Send us more Japs" and "It's a Mogami class cruiser; that mean anything to you?"
If you read a description of the plot in some TV guide, there will be attention given to a Nazi plan to develop a secret radar with unspecified powers. But it's not really about that. It's about a letter that supposedly contains clues to -- well, to something or other of importance -- and about a ring that is actually a map.
That letter enters a kind of roundelay in which it gets passed or stolen from hand to hand until the viewer loses track of it completely. Twice is passes through the hands of the stolid, humorless hero, Alan Curtis. Each time, he's coshed on the sconce, falls unconscious, and the letter is stolen from his pocket. Afterward his unwitting ex wife offers him a cup of coffee. "One lump, if I remember?" Curtis touches the back of his head gingerly and says: "This time it's two lumps." Don't judge too hastily. It may be the best line in the movie.
Moving right along, the second most important lesson to be learned from this film is that "Nowhere" is an anagram of "Erewhon", a novel written in 1872 by the New Zealander Samuel Butler. The novel was a satire of English society, somewhat like "Gulliver's Travels", and Butler described a fictional world in which artificial intelligence became so advanced that machines took a dominant role over human beings. Thus, ironically, the machines subjected themselves to Darwinian selection. Pretty cool, isn't it? The sins of the fathers and all that?
The movie. Yes, the movie. Well, it was released in 1945, it's about this charter pilot, Alan Curtis, who is hired to fly half a dozen suspicious characters to a resort in the middle of the desert. There are familiar faces among the passengers. We may note the presence of Jerome Cowan (aka Miles Archer); the succulent Evelyn Ankers, who is almost murdered during the flight, though it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to spoil her looks by killing her. Jack Holt is at the resort, an FBI agent, or so he claims. You may remember him from "They Were Expendable," as the Army General in the Philippines at the start of the war, whose lines there include, "Send us more Japs" and "It's a Mogami class cruiser; that mean anything to you?"
If you read a description of the plot in some TV guide, there will be attention given to a Nazi plan to develop a secret radar with unspecified powers. But it's not really about that. It's about a letter that supposedly contains clues to -- well, to something or other of importance -- and about a ring that is actually a map.
That letter enters a kind of roundelay in which it gets passed or stolen from hand to hand until the viewer loses track of it completely. Twice is passes through the hands of the stolid, humorless hero, Alan Curtis. Each time, he's coshed on the sconce, falls unconscious, and the letter is stolen from his pocket. Afterward his unwitting ex wife offers him a cup of coffee. "One lump, if I remember?" Curtis touches the back of his head gingerly and says: "This time it's two lumps." Don't judge too hastily. It may be the best line in the movie.