I don't mind cliches. They seem to bother lots of people something fierce.
It does bother me, though, when people get them wrong.
For instance, “That’s the million dollar question!”
Well, the quiz show that spawned that expression was The 64,000 Dollar Question. The highest prize, if you answered all the questions correctly, was $556,315 in 2013 dollars.
But the cliche mutated.
In some usages, it was a benign mutation. If you wondered whether to buy a house, you might say, "Well, that's the $229,000 question."
More commonly, though, people just upped the amount to a million dollars.
Here's another one - where does a four hundred pound gorilla sleep? Wherever he wants to.
So, just reference a four hundred pound gorilla to suggest someone so powerful or important that he always gets his way.
Until cliche inflation strikes again. It's pretty common to hear about a five hundred pound gorilla or an eight hundred pound gorilla. Gorillas do grow to four hundred pounds (thank you, Wikipedia), and I guess that a five hundred pound gorilla isn't out of the question, but where does an 800 pound gorilla sleep?
Right where he is, because I don't think he'd be able to stand up.
And the gorilla cliche cross-pollinates with another cliche, and suddenly there’s a four thousand pound elephant in the room.
This week’s matinee feature had an elephant in the room. The film was Public Enemy starring Jimmy Cagney as Tom Powers, a prohibition era gangster. His war-hero brother, Mike, doesn’t approve of him being a violent thug, and let’s him know it.
When their mother has the family around for a welcome home dinner, Tom and his sidekick bring a barrel of beer - and set it up on the dining room table.
You would not do it this way. First, it is on a stand, so it’s a little precarious. One person bumps the table and Ma Powers gets barrel in the lap. Also, it takes up a good chunk of the modest dining table, forcing everybody to talk around the barrel.
And that is the elephant in the room.
For the rest of the scene, the barrel is in every shot. Mike leans to his right to see his mother, leans to his left to talk to his sister. Tom’s bootlegging is tearing their family apart!
It’s obvious storytelling, but it isn’t bad. Movies should make use of visuals - and here one is, in the middle of the table. Tom and the family do try to ignore it, at first, and just talk around it.
The film had some other fun bits - when Tom Powers is getting ready to charge into a meeting of the enemy mob, Cagney treats us to performance of malevolent glee that Joe Pesci has not yet equaled.
Most of it, though, required a suspension of disbelief that might sprain your hip. Their first big caper, as bootleggers, was to rob the booze warehouse, draining the “booze” into a gasoline truck. What do gasoline trucks smell like? That's what their booze going to smell like.
There was a fun scene when Prohibition set it, Apparently, they only announced the Volstead act a few hours in advance, so everybody ran to well-stocked liquor stores that had to be empty at midnight. People filled their baby strollers, passed armfuls of bags into waiting taxis, threw away all the flowers in a flower truck to fill it with booze. They just threw the flowers on the ground! To make room for BOOZE!
Tom Powers came to a bad end, just like all Public Enemies. The movie is a morality tale about How Awful Gangsters Are!
That’s the million dollar elephant sleeping in the room.
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