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Are Burt Lancaster’s trousers back to front?
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magine that the youngsters in Kris Kross not only scored a global hit with “Jump” in 1992, but also with their contrary rules to clothing. That instead of wearing our pants under our ass with our boxer shorts hanging out, we were all wearing our jeans back to front. We would not have been eternally grateful to Chris Smith and Chris Kelly for that. Or would we? Could it have been a statement when Roger Federer collected his fifth Wimbledon trophy with his trousers on back to front? Or when the Jesmurva witnesses (check the Dutch cartoonist Dirkjan!) had smurfed their trousers the wrong way around, was that a tribute to the two Chris’s? Opinion is divided. In 1992, Burt Lancaster was already too crossed out to realise a pair of young rappers had started wearing their trousers backwards. Let alone that they operated under the same name as the American noir film that he had made with Robert
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Siodmak in 1949 – the German director that also gave us the noir classic The Killers, yes, also starring Burt Lancaster. Now, I haven’t seen all of Handsome Burt’s films so I don’t know if he did ever wear his trousers backwards – that would be like counting all the seconds in a minute to discover that a minute has sixty seconds. And I have only just learned from the wise Brussels politician Johan Van den Driessche that counting full stops and commas to answer a question is intellectually wrong. Hey, it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion of the ocean! The size of Burt Lancaster’s ship is something I don’t know much about, though. The Hollywood icon keeps his pants on too much in his films. As long as swimming trunks count, that is, because of course I have seen him rolling around on the beach wearing practically nothing with Deborah Kerr in From
Here to Eternity. That sand, incidentally, must have been uncomfortable for all concerned. And that one time that he appeared at the Academy Awards in a G-string, spray-painted gold from head to toe. Or in The Swimmer, in which our hunk decides to swim home via a river of pools in his Speedo avant la lettre. “The drama of a man suddenly plunged off the deep end of life,” is the tagline of that entertaining Sixties film. Just like Roger Federer, it happens to every man at one point or another.
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With lov Mark Do you have a question? Send it to questionmark@bruzz.be Criss cross 16/6, 22.00, Cinematek, www.cinematek.be