From Chaucer to movie
Does anyone know which Chaucer fable this was taken from.
shareI don't think it is based on a tale by Chaucer. This is from an entry about the movie on amazon.com: "When Lawrence E. Watkin wrote a novel called ON BORROWED TIME in 1937, he paid his readers the unusual compliment of revealing his source material. The characters in the book, he explained, were drawn form those of his grandfather-in-law and his own 5 year-old son. Its fantastic story, was borrowed from a fable that he had once heard told by Professor Horace A. Eaton in Chaucer class at Syracuse University. When Mr. Watkin's explanation was published, Professor Eaton promptly relayed the credit for the story to John Fiske, the historian and philosopher, from whom he said he had heard it before the turn of the century. Other readers surprised both both Mr. Watkin and Professor Eaton by tracing the story to medieval legends of Germany, France and Sicily."
The way I understand that, Prof Eaton was relaying a story, a very Chaucerian thing to do, but the tale seems to be more modern, and the characters based on author Watkin's life. Unfortunately, the film's director, Bucquet, muddles the origins in the opening titles.
A version of a German folk tale was told as "The Soldier And Death" in Jim Henson's "The Storyteller" -
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092383/
- my favorite episode from the series.
(-
=)~So... musicians really Rodger your Hammerstein, huh?
That was my favorite episode of "The Stroyteller," too. It's supposed to have been an amalgamation of several different stories, though. This movie probably came from a number of sources, too.
shareThe subject matter intrigues me, that's how I came here without having seen the film, but it sounds very familiar, probably based on folk tales which were around in many variants all over Europe. On the "I need to know" board a user just gave the beginning of the film like this:
The story starts with a couple driving down a country road in a late 30's touring car. They stop to pick up a hitchhiker. They proceed across a brige, and the car goes off the road in to a ravine, killing the couple. the hitchhiker turns out to be "Death".which reminded me immediately of the film "Der müde Tod/The weary Death" by Fritz Lang, except that in his film the couple is not in a car, but in a stagecoach, and Death is not exactly a hitchhiker, but some dark-clad man who stops the coach who later turns out to be Death, too. (In a more mundane way the film "Stagecoach" makes use of this motif, too.)
Therefore I tend to believe that this film is not based on just one specific source which could be traced.
Could someone explain the title to me, please? How is time "borrowed" here? From what I can make out from the plot, there's nobody here gaining time by playing chess against Death like in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"?
Regards, Rosabel
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Could someone explain the title to me, please? How is time "borrowed" here? From what I can make out from the plot, there's nobody here gaining time by playing chess against Death like in Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"?
Regards, Rosabel
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I think the title simply means "borrowed" as in if Gramps hadn't chased death up a tree and kept him there, thereby keeping everyone in the world alive, that he is living on time he wouldn't have if he hadn't done what he did... not the more modern meaning of time as he borrowed it from someone else?
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Why not watch the film and find out for yourself. It's definately worth it.
share"On borrowed time" is a traditional idiom for anyone who should be dead, but isn't. The old DC comic, "Challengers of the Unknown", was about four men who, having survived a plane crash, decided that they were living "on borrowed time", and became professional superheroes on the strength of it.
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