The goofs section of this film says that it would be impossible that C.C. could have cooked a frozen TV dinner in the few minutes that he did. When I watched this just now, I got the impression that he was planning to eat exactly at 8, since he is uptight about time, and it was past 9 and didn't want to wait long. Also, he was so pathetic, he just ate the meal when it was basically frozen, just like Woody Allen in Play it Again Sam. Did anyone else think the same?
shareI have noticed that too in my many viewing of THE APARTMENT. Today, of course with microwave ovens, people can heat up a frozen meal in no time. However, that was not true in 1960, the year THE APARTMENT was released. In the film, we see C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) light up his oven with a match and yes, he is eating his dinner in virtually the next scene. He does not seem to be eating the chicken drumstick frozen. I realize and this is where the goof would occur: There were different takes between the scene where Baxter lights his oven and the scene where we see him eat his dinner. And of course, it is not unusual when the film-makers put the movie together that they might over-look a small continuity detail like that. My only other guess was that since Baxter was starving, (Baxter did after all have to wait over an hour for the boss to get finished with the affair before he <Baxter> could back into his apartment. Hence, he could not wait for the food to really get cooked. Anyway, tokyostory2000, that was good you picked up on that too.
shareNO, that's not it. If you watch closely you will see that Baxter acts like the foil covering is extremely hot.
shareI noticed that too, and that's another goof: aluminium foil cools down very rapidly. It's so thin and weighs so little that it loses its heat immediately. You can hold aluminium foil with your bare hands just seconds after you take a dish out of the oven, while I wouldn't recommend this for the oven dish itself.
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Rome. By all means, Rome.
Well, that WOULD be true if there was nothing under the foil. But there is. A TV dinner properly cooked in an oven is hotter than heck until you peel the covering off. Microwave dinners are the same way today. The paper thin plastic covering doesn't hold heat at all by itself, but there is steam and hot food under it for 1-3 minutes after taking it out of the microwave until you peel the covering off. Hence the "Caution - package will be hot".
shareAlso, those old timey frozen dinners had rather thick aluminum foil on top, not like the ones today.
sharethis is a movie. movie time is not the same as real time. it appeared quick but you have to remember that everything happens fairly quickly in a movie.
shareYou nailed it. In a movie, the guy parks his car at the airstrip, gets right into his Cessna, starts the engine, and blam, he takes off, all in about 10 seconds of film time. No pre-flight check, no engine run-up, no waiting for clearance. Actually they show the same thing with fighters and bombers in WW2.
shareIt was a goof--but probably one of screenwriters' convenience, which doesn't make it *not* a goof.
Clearly script wanted to show he was settling down for night over what (for him) passed as a hearty dinner, before he was cast out of his own apartment into cold night again again. Yet scene plays out in real time--fact that he acts like foil is hot when he sits down doesn't mean anything (he lit stove and "cooked" TV dinner in less than three minutes--hardly even time for stove to warm up). As for eating it cold, still-frozen chicken would have been a poultry Popsicle, not the cooked drumstick he is seen eating.
Yes, only a movie and it's understandable why writers wrote it as they did.(Probably same reason accounts for why a guy living in a low-rent apartment like his with a bare-bones TV set *somehow* has a remote control device--then a very pricey luxury item--that allows him to flip through channels without wasting screen time getting up and manually changing channels. . . as practically every other TV viewer of that era did.) Still, this sort of cinematic shorthand really sticks out in an otherwise reality-based movie.
Keep in mind that the TV dinner wasn't necessarily frozen. (I didn't notice if he took it from the freezer or the refrigerator.) It wouldn't be at all unusual for a bachelor who lives on TV dinners to move the next night's meal from the freezer to the refrigerator to defrost for up to 24 hours (yet still remain cold, but not frozen), allowing for a quicker heat-up period come dinner time the next day. And the aluminum tray wouldn't cool off quickly if very hot food were in it; the hot food would keep the tray very hot much longer than if the tray had been empty all along. By the way, in pre-microwave days, the cover was thin aluminum, not plastic. Typically, the instructions called for one or more of the tray's compartments (i.e. containing cobbler dessert, fried chicken, etc.) to be uncovered for all or part of the total cooking time, with the rest remaining covered, to allow the uncovered portions to come out crispier. (Several replies combined in one spot - sorry.)
shareWell, based upon the location of the dinner in the fridge he took it out of, it was NOT frozen. He took it out of the "middle" section of the unit, and later when he retrieved it from the oven, he then grabbed his beer from a slightly higher location in the fridge.
In both cases he did not open another door inside the fridge which would have been to another compartment.
Also, while no one mentioned this possibility in this thread, the dinner had not been cooked previously and he just then was "warming it up" since the box was sealed when he struggled to open it.
Yeah, it's a goof all around, as there is obviously no way that freshly opened meal was cooked in the actual 1 minute, 45 seconds it was in the non-preheated oven. (I just times that continuous scene, into oven to out of oven was 1:45)
Hmmm, might save cooking time, but definitely not recommended for hygienic reasons. Note that all frozen dinners come with a caution not to defrost before heating.
shareDid they at the time? Food safety was definitely not what it is now. My Mom used to send tuna salad sandwiches in with me to elementary school.... and the lunchbox was in the coat closet at the back of the classroom.... no ice pack or anything. Milk in the thermos was pretty much lukewarm by lunchtime.
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