Monte Carlo is officially an administrative area of Monaco, specifically the ward of Monte Carlo/Spélugues, where the Monte Carlo Casino is located. Informally, the name also refers to a larger district, the Monte Carlo Quarter, which besides Monte Carlo/Spélugues also includes the wards of La Rousse/Saint Roman, Larvotto/Bas Moulins and Saint Michel. The permanent population of the ward of Monte Carlo is about 3,500, while that of the quarter is about 15,000. Monaco has four traditional quarters. From west to east they are: Fontvieille, Monaco-Ville, La Condamine, and Monte Carlo.
The Crying of Lot 49 is a 1966 novella by the American author Thomas Pynchon. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, the plot follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. One of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed, operating from 1806 to 1867, and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon's writing, The Crying of Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. Time included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005".
Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921). He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. In the 1910s and 1920s he was considered the United States' greatest living author. Several of his stories were adapted to film.
Fabian Anthony Forte, professionally known as Fabian, is an American singer and actor.
"Streets of Laredo", also known as "The Dying Cowboy", is a famous American cowboy ballad in which a dying ranger tells his story to another cowboy. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.
Charles De Ville Wells was an English gambler and fraudster. In a series of successful gambles in 1891 he "broke the bank at Monte Carlo", celebrated by the song "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo". Subsequently, he was often referred to, especially in publications, as "Monte Carlo Wells".
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American period drama written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles. Welles adapted Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel, about the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the social changes brought by the automobile age. The film stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, with Welles providing the narration.
Lucky Stiff is a musical farce. It was the first collaboration for the team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (music). The show is based on the 1983 novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth. It was created and performed at Playwrights Horizons off-Broadway in 1988, and won the Richard Rodgers Award for that year. The musical was seen in London's West End in 1997 but has not had a Broadway production. A film version had a limited release in theatres in 2015 but received mostly negative reviews.
Colin Whitton McCallum, known by his stage name Charles Coborn, was a British music hall singer and comedian. During a long career, Coborn was known largely for two comic songs: "Two Lovely Black Eyes", and "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."
Monsieur Beaucaire is a romantic opera in three acts, composed by André Messager. The libretto, based on the 1900 novel by Booth Tarkington, is by Frederick Lonsdale, with lyrics by Adrian Ross. The piece premiered at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Birmingham, England, on 7 April 1919, before opening at the Prince's Theatre in London under the management of Frank Curzon on 19 April 1919 and transferring to the Palace Theatre on 29 July 1919, for a successful run.
"The Gold Diggers' Song " is a song from the 1933 Warner Bros. film Gold Diggers of 1933, sung in the opening sequence by Ginger Rogers and chorus. The entire song is never performed in the 1933 movie, though it introduces the film in the opening scene. Later in the movie, the tune is heard off stage in rehearsal as the director continues a discussion on camera about other matters.
The Monte Carlo Casino, officially named Casino de Monte-Carlo, is a gambling and entertainment complex located in Monaco. It includes a casino, the Opéra de Monte-Carlo, and the office of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.
Music hall songs were sung in the music halls by a variety of artistes. Most of them were comic in nature. There are a very large number of music hall songs, and most of them have been forgotten. In London between 1900 and 1910, a single publishing company, Francis, Day and Hunter, published between forty and fifty songs a month.
Monte Carlo is a 1930 American pre-Code musical comedy film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It co-stars Jack Buchanan as a French Count Rudolph Falliere masquerading as a hairdresser and Jeanette MacDonald as Countess Helene Mara. The film is notable for introducing the song "Beyond the Blue Horizon", which was written for the film and is first performed by MacDonald and a chorus on the soundtrack as she escapes on the train through he countryside. Monte Carlo was hailed by critics as a masterpiece of the newly emerging musical film genre. The screenplay was based on the Booth Tarkington novel Monsieur Beaucaire.
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo is a 1935 American romantic comedy film made by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Stephen Roberts, and starred Ronald Colman, Joan Bennett, and Colin Clive. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and Howard Smith, based on a play by Ilya Surgutchoff and Frederick Albert Swan. The film was inspired by the song of the same name popularised by Charles Coborn.
Loser Takes All is a 1956 British comedy film directed by Ken Annakin, starring Glynis Johns, Rossano Brazzi, and Robert Morley, with a screenplay by Graham Greene based on his 1955 novella of the same name.
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo may refer to:
The Monte Carlo Casino was inaugurated in 1863. Since then the bank has been broken on a number of occasions. The expression "breaking the bank" is used when a gambler wins more money than the reserve held at that particular table in the casino. At the start of each day, every table was funded with a cash reserve of 100,000 francs – known as "the bank". If this reserve was insufficient to pay the winnings, play at that table was suspended while extra funds were brought out from the casino's vaults.
Joseph Hobson Jagger was an English textile industry businessman from Yorkshire, who in around 1881 is said to have "broken the bank at Monte Carlo" by identifying and exploiting biases in the wheels of the roulette tables there. He used his winnings to buy property in Bradford. In 2018 he was the subject of a biography by his great-great niece Anne Fletcher.
Frederick Younge Gilbert was an English theatrical agent and writer of music hall songs.
