A Movie to Remember
Category: Movies...
Posted Friday, May 11, 2007 at 09:43 AM [GMT-6]

I've been inundated by demands for the answer to the throwaway movie quiz I left at the end of yesterday's Random Thursday post ("inundated" being a relative term, with the scale running from zero ["overwhelmed"] to one ["inundated"]), so I'll reveal the answer in a moment.

For those who couldn't quite wade through that post, here's the description I provided: The [movie's] dialog was in English, but the movie had Dutch subtitles.

The film was being aired on the Turner Classic Movie channel, and I ran across it in the course of flipping through channels seeking some weather updates. It was obviously an American-made movie, so the presence of Dutch subtitles was intriguing. It took me a few minutes to discover what that was all about; as it turns out, the film was made in 1938, and the only surviving copy was discovered in a film archive in -- you guessed it -- the Netherlands.

The title? A Man to Remember (the movie also had an alternative title of Country Doctor).

The film predates the infinitely more familiar It's a Wonderful Life by eight years, but they both share the "richest man in town" theme.

I was also amazed at how closely many Dutch words resemble their English counterparts, or how much of our language was borrowed from or derived from theirs.

One last bit of related trivia is that some of the on-screen writing -- notes on postcards, etc. -- were overwritten in Dutch, and there's no accompanying English translation. Since this is the only remaining copy of the movie, most of us will be out of luck in ever knowing the content of those messages, other than what we can intuit* from the context.

*You probably didn't realize that if you try to hack the Wikipedia URL for the entry on "Inuit music" (and who among us hasn't, at one time or another) you'll need to misspell "Inuit" as "Intuit": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_(music).