Let Them Eat Cake
It's (almost) my birthday so the theme is cake 🎂
My birthday is tomorrow! Which I’m feeling thoroughly ambivalent about but using as a prompt for a post. Voilà but a morsel of the many film stills I have of cakes (birthday or otherwise).
Time-lapse via technicolor birthday cakes in Heaven Can Wait (1943),
dir. Ernst Lubitsch.
Bad things happen at a birthday party in The Birds (1963), dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
Another time lapse through cake. Victims of Sin (1951), dir. Emilio Fernández.
Big Daddy’s birthday cake in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), dir. Richard Brooks.
Italian dystopian future visions of a pre-9/11 NYC — as a birthday cake. 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), dir. Enzo G. Castellari.
Four friends decide to gorge themselves to death in La Grande Bouffe (1973), dir. Marco Ferreri. Ornate cakes and decadent treats aplenty.
Those last ones I think are actually puddings but were too gorgeous and breast-shaped not to feature. They remind me of Cassatella di Sant’Agata, sicilian pastries honoring Saint Agatha and the… interesting way she was martyred.
A voyeuristic encounter during a 21st birthday party leads to a doomed friendship in Peeping Tom (1960), dir. Michael Powell.
Brothel birthday party on the American Frontier in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), dir. Robert Altman.
Virna Lisi emerges from a large decorative cake like Venus on the Half-Shell. How To Murder Your Wife (1965), dir. Richard Quine. Yes, as the title would indicate, this movie is hopelessly sexist.
A truly terrible movie with a fun party scene involving an oversized cake crawling with sexy frosted cake nymphs. Pussycat, Pussycat I Love You (1970) dir. Rod Amateau. I cannot in good faith recommend this movie.
Another girl, another cake to pop out of. Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen.
Sometimes you don’t pop out of the cake, but you do fall into it. The Great Race (1965), dir. Blake Edwards. This movie is too long.
Technically this is an enormous pie fight but the candy-colored frosting is sending mixed messages. I like that by the end of this sequence, the kitchen/war zone looks like an abstract expressionist canvas. Crazy prop frosting swathed on thick like gouache.
The icon Setsuko Hara shows two very different cake moods.
Early Summer (1951), dir. Yasujirō Ozu. Late Spring (1949), dir. Yasujirō Ozu.
Isabelle Adjani in Deadly Circuit (1983), dir. Claude Miller. I wrote about this film briefly here.
Sometimes your cake is concealing an explosive device meant to kill James Bond. Diamonds are Forever (1971), dir. Guy Hamilton.
Amazing period piece banquet spreads in Amadeus (1984), dir. Miloš Forman. Note the chocolate treble clefs.
The queen of cakes and letting people eat ‘em! Marie Antoinette (2006), dir. Sofia Coppola. The food styling in this movie is fantastic.
Marie’s own birthday cake with enormous spun sugar ornaments, orchids and sparklers? Unreal.
Another GOAT period piece for production design via on-screen meals. The Age of Innocence (1993), dir. Martin Scorsese. A petit-four is a little cake to me!!!
The scion of a wealthy family’s birthday, presented in an opening credit sequence of home movie footage, and then later in present-day as the movie’s events unfold. The Game (1997), dir. David Fincher.
Make a wish. My queen Isabelle Huppert in The Lacemaker (1997), dir. Claude Goretta. Also wrote a few thoughts about this in my opening post for Mixed Fruits.
Until next time!
xo Mona