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It’s the two-year anniversary of Stay On Fountain!  I have to say, I’m in love with this more today than I was yesterday.

There’s a lot of blogs out there, a lot of content.  A blog’s like a mini, mini restaurant.  It’s hard to stay open during the formative years.  I am proud to have regularly updated and kept this train moving in the last year.  I hope to bring you all even more content, more regularly, in the months to come, and I plan to keep this going another year, and another.

Thank you for reading, and if you like the blog, please comment, tell your friends, and subscribe at the top of the home page.

With that out of the way, I’m reintroducing a long-planned Stay On Fountain segment, Hollywood Archaeology, wherein Adam investigates the origins of film stereotypes and stereotropes.  There are no stereotropes, but I wanted to be cute.

EPISODE 1: “The Cliche Vanishes!”

Or maybe I should say that the Lady Vanishes, but not the Cliches.  I recently rewatched the early Hitchcock classic, “The Lady Vanishes.”  Even for a movie made in 1938, “Lady” bears witness to the seeds of a lot of modern film cliches.

As anyone who has ever seen “When Harry Met Sally” can attest to, “The Lady Vanishes” features romantic leads who find each other repellent at the movie’s start.  Margaret Lockwood is a wealthy young socialite traveling through Europe by train.  She has an run-in with the obnoxious Michael Redgrave the night earlier, who was rehearsing a folk dance routine, much to the noisy chagrin of Margaret.  Margaret bribes the hotel clerk to chuck Redgrave out on his ear when he won’t comply.  Redgrave decides to invade Margaret’s berth and rape her? as punishment.  Oooh oooh oooh, she just HATES him!

We’ve seen this romantic pairing a hundred times, done to death.  However, a marvelous thing happened watching “Lady.” I realized this one of the first, if not the first, instance of this storyline being played out.  I got the sense that this is what the first cheeseburger must have tasted like before it became available every few feet.  Redgrave is legitimately obnoxious, and Margaret, albeit justifiably upset, is a total bitch for getting him chucked out like that.  So, it was genuinely refreshing to see them let their guards down and team up together scenes later when the titular lady done vanishes.

I’m going to engage in a history lesson in the coming weeks, ladies and gentlemen.  I’m very interested in the origin of all these old cliches.  Who was the first one to punch out a mirror and look at themselves in the shards?  Who was the first attractive female lead to become more charming by being a klutz? Who was the first cop to be killed three days from retirement? Who was the first one to be too old for this shit?

I’m making it my business to find out! If anybody has any suggestions, send ‘em my way in the comments section!