Bad Day at Black Rock (USA, 1955)

Bad Day at Black Rock (USA, 1955). Director: John Sturges. Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis...

This one is thanks to my friend Mark Loeser, creator of the pinball supercut video that is projected in a loop at the North Star pinball bar in Montreal, Canada. Even though this blog is more about me stumbling upon pinball appearances in movies, sometimes I can’t resist dipping into sources like this.

Anyway, it’s just after World War II ended, and good ol’ Spencer tracy arrives in a one-horse town, looking for some answers. Everyone in town makes it clear that he is most unwelcome.

At one point Ernest Borgnine disrupts his meal, pushing for a fight. In the background, Robert Ryan plays a Follies of 1940 (Genco, 1939). The whole scene lasts several minutes, and the machine is visible a lot of the time...

The fight happens... and hey, that’s Lee Marvin sitting there...

So nice to see an old machine like this in color...

Robert Ryan was previously featured playing pinball in my post about the 1949 movie Caught.

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action (USA, 1968)

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action (USA, 1968). Season 2, Episode 17. Director: James Komack. Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley...

Normally I don’t do TV shows on this blog, but since I love the original Star Trek and there were these nice old machines to identify, I made an exception...

The basic premise of the episode is that Captain Kirk and the gang go to a planet and discover a culture who have adopted a way of life based on a book on gangsters of the 1920s, accidentally left behind by previous visitors from Earth.

At one point, Kirk and the gang are captured and put “on ice” in a warehouse under guard, amongst some dusty pinball and slot machines.

These tables are from 1941 and 1952... talk about major pinball anachronism! Pinball as we know it didn’t quite exist yet in the 20s... they were still bagatelles with no flippers, and weren’t even coin-operated until the early 30s, let alone electric.

Anyway, this is not the place to get into a detailed history of pinball or be overly critical, since this is after all a science fiction story set not in the 1920s, but in 2268!

What we spot here on the left are a couple of Majors - 1941 (Chicago Coin, 1941), one of them very dusty, as well as  a Twenty Grand (Williams, 1952) closest to the crew...

Kirk about to create a diversion, with the Twenty Grand visible over his shoulder... BTW, it had flippers, which only started appearing on pinball tables in 1947 :-)...

After a brief explanation of the game of “Fizzbin”, a fight breaks out. In the wider shot, we can see a third  Majors - 1941 machine on the right...

As Spock and ‘Bones exit, we get a closer look at the flipperless Majors - 1941...

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Canada, 1974)

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Canada, 1974). Director: Ted Kotcheff. Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, Micheline Lanctôt, Jack Warden, Randy Quaid...

This is the film adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s 1959 novel about an ambitious young working-class jewish man determined to make a name for himself no matter what the cost. The story takes place in the late 1940s in Montreal.

An scene early in the film takes place in Wilensky’s Light Lunch (a classic, family-operated soda fountain & Jewish deli since 1932 which exists to this day, although at the time of the story, was in a different location). I doubt they really had a pinball machine in the place, but for the movie, the girl that Duddy’s father pimps leans against a Sittin’ Pretty (Gottlieb, 1958)...

Of course, this is a pinball anachronism... the machine is a decade too modern. Also, in the late 40s, early 50s, machines still had wooden legs, not metal like we see here...

It’s too bad the movie didn’t use a Sea Breeze or a Richelieu machine, made by the Montreal-based North Star Coin Machine Co. These tables were made in 1949-1950, which would have better fit the time period that the story was set.

Later, one of Duddy’s money-making schemes is to sell some pinball machines. On a train to NYC, he meets Virgil (Randy Quaid), an american who bought 10 machines in order to go into business for himself, but alas, pinball is banned in the U.S. and he’s stuck with them. Duddy proposes that if Virgil got them to Montreal, he would take them off his hands.

Virgil does so, and they pile them into a truck during a downpour and drive them up to Ste-Agathe, a resort town in the Laurentians, about an hour and a half North of Montreal.

All we see is them loading an Arrow Head (Williams, 1957) without even bothering to take the legs and backbox off...

And we catch a glimpse of the cabinet of a Jig Saw (Williams, 1957) already loaded in the truck. Again, these machines are from a later decade than when the story is set...

In Ste-Agathe, they try to sell the Arrow Head (Williams, 1957)...

In the novel, he manages to sell all but one of the machines, which ends up in his apartment. In the movie, for economy, they show us the same table from the previous scene,  which is the Arrow Head...

Bonus:
In a scene in a bowling alley, there’s a Short-Stop (Williams, 1958) baseball / bat game in the background...

Begin Again (USA, 2013)

Begin Again (USA, 2013). Director: John Carney. Stars: Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, Adam Levine, Catherine Keener...

pinballbelle spotted this one first and mentioned it in this post, and I finally identified it. I would have spotted it eventually myself because I tend to see any movie that Catherine Keener is in (no matter how dubious)...

The scene is not worth setting up. Suffice to say that this vintage machine serves as mere decoration in this posh NYC apartment and no-one plays it. Anyway, it was a tough one to identify, especially since we don’t get a close look. The last of the woodrail machines was about 1960, and the last use of wooden legs was about 1956. There seemed to be too many score digits for an old machine, but it turns out that 4 of the 7 are dummy zeros! Anyway, it’s a Dealer (Williams, 1953)...

Harold and Maude (USA, 1971)

Harold and Maude (USA, 1971). Director: Hal Ashby. Stars: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles...

A classic film, surely one of the quirkiest love stories ever made.

There’s a scene in an arcade, with plenty of pinball machines and other coin-operated games and stuff, but due to camera angles and them being too far in the background, barely any could be identified.

For instance, on the left behind this huge train set diorama, there’s a whole row of machines, but too hard to identify. BTW, the bearded man in the center is the film’s director doing a cameo...

There’s a whole row of woodrails, but apart from the foregroundmost one with the yellow & red braid design on the cabinet, which is a Control Tower (Williams, 1951), the others are too hard to identify...

Here we can spot a baseball bat game... the backbox is a Deluxe Official Baseball (Williams, 1960) but the cabinet does not match. We can also see a few pinball machines including a couple more woodrails, but I could not identify them...

Farewell, My Lovely (USA, 1975)

Farewell, My Lovely (USA, 1975). Director: Dick Richards. Stars: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack O'Halloran...

Robert Mitchum, who starred in several classic film noirs, plays an older, world-weary private detective Philip Marlowe in this neo-noir. As usual with Raymond Chandler’s detective novel adaptations, it’s filled with narration and wisecracks.

At the end of the movie, Marlowe, who kept mentioning baseball and Joe DiMaggio throughout the movie, is in a penny arcade checking out a 1937 World Series (Rock-Ola Mfg. Corp., 1937-1941) bat game machine...

When he walks out, on the left is a row of Skee-Ball games, and on the right we can spot a Jolly Joker (Williams, 1955) woodrail pinball machine. However, it looks like the front of the cabinet isn’t the right one. In any case, since the movie is set in summer/fall of 1941, the machine is an anachronism...

Caught (USA, 1949)

Caught (USA, 1949). Director: Max Ophüls (as Max Opuls), Starring: Robert Ryan, James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes...

In this drama / film noir, Robert Ryan plays a very rich control freak, a character loosely based on Howard Hughes. The role was originally cast for James Mason in his american film debut, but he demanded to switch roles and play the nice guy for a change.

Anyway, this rich guy has a pinball machine in his living room, a Carnival (Bally, 1948), which has that rather new innovation…flippers! The cabinet and backbox seems to have been wallpapered… possibly to avoid paying licensing fees? It’s odd, because the manufacturer’s name does not appear there anyway. In any case, there was enough for me to identify the table from the playfield...

Ryan’s character seems to like to take his aggression out on the machine, so much so that he tilts in a major way...

And that’s my second post that ends with broken pinball glass :-(.

TILT.