#501 Man From The South- Roald Dahl
This is a classic story. If it seems familiar it’s because
it has been adapted into a couple of movies. Most famous of these adaptations
was the 1960 short by Alfred Hitchcock starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre; and
the most recent was Quentin Tarantino’s Four Rooms.
The plot is simple but brilliant. A young man is lured into
a high stakes wager against a wealthy stranger. The man bets the youngster that
he cannot successfully ignite his lighter ten times consecutively. The man bets
his expensive green Cadillac. The
younger man not having that kind of loot to put up, agrees that if he loses, he
will allow the rich man to chop off the pinky of his left hand.
They retire to the hotel and make arrangements for the wager to
commence. The younger man, with his left hand tied down, strikes the lighter
once, twice…seven, eight times. As the tension builds, a woman bursts into the
room to put a stop to the bet. The car is hers, she has already won it from the
man…she has won all of his wealth in fact. When she picks up the keys to the
car, we see that she only has one finger left.
Clearly this is a monster of a story. We see its
fingerprints in so many places. Besides the many film and television references
I also remember a short story by Stephen King that paid homage to Man From the
South. The finger cutting wasn’t a straight wager but an incentive to quit
smoking, and the woman at the end revealing her lost fingers was a previous
client. The story was called Quitter’s Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment