Plot
Lucky Cullen (Milton Berle) gets into trouble when his boss, bookie Tony Miller (Cesar Romero), finds out that Lucky has bet (and lost) $5000 under a false identity. Tony gives Lucky 24 hours to settle the debt.
Lucky learns that he has inherited a Fifth Avenue art gallery from his uncle. When he and Tony check it out, however, Helen Mason (Carole Landis) informs them that the business is so far in debt it is worthless. Attracted to Helen, Tony cancels Lucky's debt in exchange for the gallery. He takes Helen out to dinner and gets her to start teaching him about art. When Tony finds gallery employee Stewart Haines (Richard Derr) kissing Helen, he sends Stewart on a buying trip to Europe.
Meanwhile, Lucky is pestered by "Genius" (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a struggling painter. Just to get rid of him, Lucky gives him $10 for his abstract paintings. Thrilled, Genius returns again and again with more of his work. To Lucky's surprise, a patron later buys Genius's work.
Trying to impress Helen, Tony buys a Rembrandt from Claire Barrington (Rose Hobart) for $20,000, only to have the gallery's art expert, Appleby (Francis Pierlot), unmask the painting as a very good fake. Tony confronts Claire and Gigi (J. Carrol Naish), the forger, and retrieves his money. Then he has an idea. Helen had told him about a missing Velasquez, Two Children in the Court. Tony gets Gigi to paint a copy. He then presents it to a thrilled Helen to sell at an auction at the gallery.
Tony becomes concerned when government buyer Finchley enters the bidding. He orders Lucky to buy the painting, but Helen stops him, and Finchley gets the work for $84,000. Further complications arise when Stewart returns from his trip with Don Fernando (Steven Geray) and the genuine painting. After Lucky kidnaps Don Fernando, a worried Tony buys the work for $100,000, then switches it with Gigi's forgery, only to have the government expert dismiss it as a bad copy. Helen insists that other experts be brought in. While they wait, Tony confesses the truth to her. Meanwhile, Gigi substitutes his (much better) forgery, and the new experts are satisfied it is genuine. To show Helen that he is not in it for the money anymore, Tony donates it to the government free of charge.
Tony gives the gallery to Helen and Stewart and returns to what he knows. Helen shows up at the racetrack and forgives him. Lucky then returns Tony's $100,000; he paid Don Fernando with counterfeit money.
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione, was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties. He is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him. The uncertainty surrounding the identity and meaning of his work has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European art.
The year 1940 in film involved some significant events, including the premieres of the Walt Disney films Pinocchio and Fantasia.
Giovanni Antonio Canal, commonly known as Canaletto, was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school.
Simon Munnery is an English comedian.
The Rebel is a 1961 British satirical comedy film directed by Robert Day and starring Tony Hancock. It was written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The film concerns the clash between bourgeois and bohemian cultures.
The Hollywood Palace was an hourlong American television variety show broadcast Saturday nights on ABC from January 4, 1964, to February 7, 1970. Titled The Saturday Night Hollywood Palace for its first few weeks, it began as a midseason replacement for The Jerry Lewis Show, another variety show, which lasted only three months.
William Kurelek, was a Canadian artist and writer. His work was influenced by his childhood on the prairies, his Ukrainian-Canadian roots, his struggles with mental illness, and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
Tales of Manhattan is a 1942 American anthology film directed by Julien Duvivier. Thirteen writers, including Ben Hecht, Alan Campbell, Ferenc Molnár, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Donald Ogden Stewart, worked on the six stories in this film. Based on the Mexican writer Francisco Rojas González's novel, Historia de un frac, which he was not credited for, the stories follow a black formal tailcoat cursed by a cutter as it goes from owner to owner, in five otherwise unconnected stories.
The Devil Is a Woman is a 1935 American romance film directed and photographed by Josef von Sternberg, adapted from the 1898 novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs. The film was based on a screenplay by John Dos Passos, and stars Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, and Alison Skipworth. The movie is the last of the six Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations for Paramount Pictures.
Springtime in the Rockies is an American Technicolor musical comedy film released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1942. It stars Betty Grable, with support from John Payne, Carmen Miranda, Cesar Romero, Charlotte Greenwood, and Edward Everett Horton. Also appearing were Grable's future husband Harry James and his band. The director was Irving Cummings. The screenplay was based on the short story "Second Honeymoon" by Philip Wylie.
Humoresque is a 1946 American melodrama film by Warner Bros. starring Joan Crawford and John Garfield in a tale about a violinist and his patroness. The screenplay by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold was based upon the 1919 short story "Humoresque" by Fannie Hurst, which previously was made into a film in 1920. Humoresque was directed by Jean Negulesco and produced by Jerry Wald.
The Stuckism International Gallery was the gallery of the Stuckist art movement. It was open from 2002 to 2005 in Shoreditch, and was run by Charles Thomson, the co-founder of Stuckism. It was launched by a procession carrying a coffin marked "The death of conceptual art" to the neighbouring White Cube gallery.
Anthony Gene Tetro, known as Tony Tetro, is an art forger known for his perfectionism in copies of artwork produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Tetro never received formal art lessons, but learned from books, by painting and experimentation. Over three decades, Tetro forged works by Rembrandt, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí and Norman Rockwell and others. Tetro's paintings and lithographs, known for their perfectionism, were sold by art dealers and auction houses as legitimate works and hang in museums, galleries around the world. He was caught after Hiro Yamagata found a forgery of his own work for sale in a gallery.
Five Thousand Dollars on One Ace is a 1964 Spanish Spaghetti Western film directed by Alfonso Balcázar, scored by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Don Powell, and starring Robert Woods, Fernando Sancho and Helmut Schmid.
The year 2011 in art involved some significant events and new works.
Mark Augustus Landis is an American painter who lives in Laurel, Mississippi. He is best known for donating large numbers of forged paintings and drawings to American art museums.
The Falcon in Mexico is a 1944 film directed by William Berke and stars Tom Conway in his recurring role as a suave amateur sleuth, supported by Mona Maris and Martha Vickers. Conway would play the Falcon seven more times before RKO retired the franchise in 1946.The Falcon in Mexico was the ninth of 16 films in the Falcon detective series. The film features many second unit sequences filmed in Mexico and Brazil; the latter scenes from Orson Welles's aborted film It's All True.
In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, 13 works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Security guards admitted two men posing as policemen responding to a disturbance call, and the thieves bound the guards and looted the museum over the next hour. The case is unsolved; no arrests have been made, and no works have been recovered. The stolen works have been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars by the FBI and art dealers. The museum offers a $10 million reward for information leading to the art's recovery, the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution.
Arthur Joseph Sulley was a London-based art dealer best known for selling Dutch Old Master paintings, including the record-setting Rembrandt van Rijn's The Mill.
