QUESTION Did Elvis Presley ever make a Western?
Elvis saddled up for his first function movie — the post-Civil Warfare Western Love Me Tender (1956) — and considered one of his final display screen appearances as an actor was as an outlaw attempting to go straight in Charro!
On this 1969 Western, Elvis sported a stubbly beard — maybe as a nod to Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man With No Title’ character, which was well-established on the time.
In between these two movies, he starred in Don Siegel’s 1960 Western Flaming Star, by which he performed a troubled character whose father was a rancher and mom was a member of the Kiowa tribe.
In Frankie And Johnny (1966) he performed a Mississippi riverboat singer who preferred to gamble.
Elvis typically starred in two, generally three movies a 12 months — most of them formulaic, enjoyable, light-weight autos, made to maintain Elvis followers all over the world joyful.
They lacked the dramatic depth of his Westerns, and in Flaming Star, produced — like Love Me Tender — by twentieth Century Fox, he provides a memorably highly effective efficiency.
Alan Wightman, Newport, Gwent.
Elvis saddled up for his first function movie — the post-Civil Warfare Western Love Me Tender (1956) — and considered one of his final display screen appearances as an actor was as an outlaw attempting to go straight in Charro!
QUESTION What’s the origin of the time period ‘fleapit’ when talking a couple of native cinema?
Fleapit, bug hutch, bug home and scratch hatch had been all phrases for second-rate, grubby cinemas that proliferated within the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties. As writer Anthony Burgess states in Inside Mr Enderby: ‘Right here was the genuine fleapit… epitome of each bughouse that Enderby had, as a toddler, queued exterior.’
By the center of the Nineteen Thirties, 18 million individuals per week in Britain went to the cinema. Sheffield alone had 52 venues. There was an ideal distinction between town centre ‘image palaces’ and the native neighbourhood ‘fleapits’. The venues diversified extensively by way of worth, programming, seating capability, ornament, facilities, clientele and standing.
The bugs had been fairly actual. In Mark Aston’s ebook The Cinemas Of Camden, native historian Des Whyman recalled visits to The Courtroom the place: ‘The usherettes got here down the auditorium’s two aisles and sprayed pesticide to kill fleas, flies and bugs.’ College School London movie historian Professor Melvyn Stokes, director of the analysis challenge Remembering British Cinema-going Of The Sixties, tells an identical story. At an occasion within the Wirral discussing cinemas of that period, members of the viewers recalled youngsters’s matinees, the place a cinema worker would spray the auditorium with the insecticide DDT, to fight fleas or head lice.
Michael Frost, Sheffield.
QUESTION What is the origin of the insurance coverage trade?
Insurance coverage will be traced all the best way again to the Historic Babylonians. In the course of the interval 4000BC to 3000BC, it was referred to as bottomry. Bottomry contracts had been recognized to Hindus as nicely, round 600BC, and had been additionally recognised beneath Roman legislation.
These bottomry contracts had been barely totally different to what we all know as insurance coverage. Loans had been made to retailers who traded by sea, but when their ship was misplaced at sea the loans didn’t must be repaid. The curiosity on the mortgage coated the insurance coverage threat.
In Historic Rome, a type of life insurance coverage existed with the formation of burial societies. When a member died, their funeral prices can be met by the society, which isn’t dissimilar to modern-day insurance coverage insurance policies which can be offered on the premise of overlaying funeral prices.
In Historic Rome, a type of life insurance coverage existed with the formation of burial societies. Pictured: The Colosseum
Marine insurance coverage, which emerged from bottomry, began to grow to be extremely developed through the fifteenth century, as retailers and ship house owners began to commerce additional and additional afield.
Hearth insurance coverage started within the UK following the Nice Hearth of London (1666). Firms not solely offered monetary safety, in addition they shaped their very own ‘hearth brigades’ to battle fires and subsequently restrict the corporate’s losses.
It’s mentioned that if adjoining buildings had been on hearth, two totally different hearth brigades may flip up and neither would battle the fireplace within the property coated by the rival firm.
Steel ‘hearth marks’ put in on buildings indicated which firms insured them in opposition to hearth. As they had been metallic, they had been much less more likely to be destroyed in a fireplace and served as proof of a constructing’s cowl within the occasion of a declare.
The Hand In Hand is Britain’s oldest surviving insurance coverage firm. It was based in 1696. In 1905 it was acquired by Industrial Union.
In London, Lloyd’s Espresso Home (initially established in Tower Avenue, earlier than shifting to Lombard Avenue within the 1690s) was a gathering place for buyers in marine insurance coverage. It’s the origin of Lloyd’s of London, which remains to be one of many largest insurance coverage brokers on the earth.
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
