The Gad About Town

Work on Mount Rushmore National Memorial began on this date in 1927. Gutzon Borglum, a sculptor from Idaho whose monumental works had made him noteworthy (a six-ton marble head of Abraham Lincoln had been exhibited in the White House during Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure), and several hundred workers started blasting granite from the the face of the mountain, where George Washington’s visage now rests.

Borglum died in May 1941 with the project unfinished—he intended to carve more than the presidents’ faces, but funding dried up after his death and his son suspended the work in its “unfinished” state at the end of that year. Over fourteen years, four-hundred workers drilled holes in the granite and exploded dynamite caps to loosen the rock face to fulfill Borglum’s monumental vision of a monument.
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Alfred Hitchcock is credited with coining the term “MacGuffin,” but not the thing itself, which has been around since people started telling stories to each other. In spy movies and thrillers, a MacGuffin is the object that sets the plot of the movie in motion; it’s usually a something people desire that the hero and his nemeses pursue, and that pursuit provides the film’s plot. The specific nature and form of the MacGuffin is usually unimportant to the overall plot. In plot terms, but not theological ones, the apple in Genesis is a MacGuffin.

In The Maltese Falcon, which made its debut in American movie theaters 75 years ago today, Mary Astor’s character Brigid O’Shaughnessy asks Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) if he would (be doing what he is about to do) if (money had possibly been acquired). (How’s that for avoiding a spoiler?)

The Maltese falcon, a jewel-encrusted treasure of centuries past, or not, is an innocent bystander for the entire movie. It sure looks valuable, looks like it is worth multiple lives, double- and triple-cheating, the sacrifice of love both real and pretend. As Det. Polhaus says as he lifts it, in the second-to-last line, it sure is, “heavy. What is it?” Sam Spade replies, and this is no spoiler even though it is the final line, “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”
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