That Scene with the Catherine O'Hara Swordfight...
There's a lot of Catherine O'Hara retrospecting going on now (as there should be), with discussions of her best work, and how many times she was the high point of a movie (some lackluster, some great).
I've watched her work ever since SCTV showed up on the tube in the wee hours (the 1/2 hour Canadian version, which begat the NBC-funded show, which begat....); and there are numerous wonderful bits/scenes/skits that she was in which come to mind.
But in our household, the hands-down favorite of her many works is "the Catherine O'Hara Swordfighting Scene", that was one of the extras of Criterion's The Princess Bride laserdisc.
It is a hoot. Yeah, it's full of slapstick/silent comedy conventions (that usually bore me); but the fight scene has a sort of sheer, Looney Tunes cartoon energy that lays waste to all my nitpicking.
And O'Hara, as an ersatz Veronica Lake villain, is the very best part of it. Her delivery, her spoof of the femme fatale tropes, and her sheer unflappable superiority in the face of law and order is a treat.
Here's the full scene, with sound:
Source for the entire episode.
(I know, the resolution of this clip isn't great; I remember it being clearer on the laserdisc. Apparently the scene never made it to the Criterion The Princess Bride DVD/Blu Ray/4K collection of extras.)
Some background and context after the cut:
Back in the 90s, we discovered this scene on The Criterion Collection's Princess Bride laserdisc. Then, as now, Criterion provided a bounty of extras; and amongst all the Princess Bride commentary and background was a curious addition: a scene from an episode of Rob Reiner's very short-lived 1991 TV series, Morton & Hayes.
I'm not certain why it's on the laserdisc; the only connection with The Princess Bride appears to be that it was another swordfight scene that Reiner was involved in. As usual with Criterion, the director has a lot of say in their presentation of the movie, and he may have suggested it be added to the extras.
(BTW, Reiner didn't direct this Morton & Hayes episode ("Daffy Dicks") -- it was Christopher Guest, who also starred in it.)
Morton & Hayes was a true oddball -- an attempt to recreate (as best as I can determine) old 1940's black-and-white movie comedy for a modern (well, 1990s) audience. It seems to have been built on the bones of the Abbott and Costello movies (Morton and Hayes resemble the 2 significantly -- particularly the straight man/clown dynamic), though the humor was closer to Bob Hope's 40s stuff (e.g., the 1939 The Cat and the Canary).
Some context for the scene: Catherine O'Hara's character is, basically, a homicidal Veronica Lake spoof, who is revealed at the end of the episode (a murder mystery comedy) as the evil twin of her saintly (and wealthy) sister, who she has murdered, along with about everyone else in the mansion, to inherit her sister's vast fortune.
The only other characters remaining in the mansion are our two hapless detectives, Morton & Hayes; and the scene opens as she prepares to snuff them out.
(Also, you have to admire a script that contains that fine old phrase, "the shank of the evening".)
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I really enjoyed Catherine O'Hara's work over many years, in just about everything I saw her in. R.I.P.; you will be missed.
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