Tagged: Plaid Sportcoat
Casino – De Niro’s Blue and Yellow Plaid Sportcoat
Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein in Casino (1995).
Vitals
Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, Vegas casino executive and mob associate
Las Vegas, Spring 1977
Film: Casino
Release Date: November 22, 1995
Director: Martin Scorsese
Costume Design: Rita Ryack & John A. Dunn
Background
Spring is coming, and that means bright colors… a color palette that few movies have mastered for men’s fashion as well as Scorsese’s crime epic Casino.
As top handicapper and Vegas casino runner “Ace” Rothstein, Robert De Niro wears more than fifty different costumes, all generally a series of colorful suits and sport coats. Some who don’t know better have criticized the film for this, unable to take the man seriously for his wardrobe. However, Ace’s costumes are a reflection of the wardrobe of his real life counterpart Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. In fact, costumer Rita Ryack mentions in an interview that the real Lefty’s clothing was even more extravagant than De Niro’s. Continue reading
Don Draper’s New Year’s Eve Plaid Sportcoat
Vitals
Jon Hamm as Don Draper in “The Doorway, Part 2” (Episode 6.02 of Mad Men).
Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Madison Avenue ad man
New York City, New Year’s Eve 1967
Series: Mad Men
Episode: “The Doorway, Part 2” (Episode 6.02)
Air Date: April 7, 2013
Director: Scott Hornbacher
Costume Designer: Janie Bryant
Background
Mad Men‘s penultimate (or pen-penultimate, depending on how you look at it) season begins in Hawaii during the Drapers’ tropical vacation but soon shifts back to the cold harsh reality of Manhattan in December. While this sort of setting would have been idyllic a few years earlier during the Rat Pack era, it is now dominated by unwashed squatters living with teenage runaways and their violins. Continue reading
Paul Newman as Harper – Brown Plaid Sport Coat
Paul Newman as Lew Harper in Harper (1966).
Vitals
Paul Newman as Lew Harper, wisecracking private eye
Los Angeles, Late Summer 1965
Film: Harper
Release Date: February 23, 1966
Director: Jack Smight
Background
By the mid 1960s, Paul Newman had proved himself to be one of the most talented – and yet still down-to-earth – actors in the industry. He had racked up impressive performances in dramas like The Long Hot Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Exodus, The Hustler, and Hud, but the world still had yet to see how well the charming blue-eyed actor could handle comedy.
Around this time, novelist and screenwriter William Goldman was desperately trying to get Ross MacDonald’s 1949 mystery novel The Moving Target turned into a film. The film rights were purchased, and Goldman completed his first ever solo screenplay, now titled Harper. Frank Sinatra was originally slated to play the protagonist, as he was looking for detective roles at the time, but the role eventually went to Newman. Continue reading
Roger Moore as 007: The Man with the Red and Black Check Sportcoat
Roger Moore strikes a pose as James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).
Vitals
Roger Moore as James Bond, British government agent
Thailand, Spring 1974
Film: The Man with the Golden Gun
Release Date: December 20, 1974
Director: Guy Hamilton
Tailor: Cyril Castle
Wardrobe Supervisor: Elsa Fennell
Background
The Man with the Golden Gun was the first Bond movie I ever saw. Given that my first Connery Bond was Diamonds are Forever and my first theater-seen Bond was Die Another Day, it’s a miracle at all that I became the Bond enthusiast I am today after starting with these three. (Britt Ekland in a bikini in The Man with the Golden Gun may have helped keep me enthused, though.)
The film’s plot ditches the majority of Ian Fleming’s mostly-ghostwritten finale to the Bond canon, keeping only the primary villain – golden gun-wielding assassin Francisco Scaramanga – intact. The simple story of Bond infiltrating Scaramanga’s organization is replaced with a current events story that weaves in the then-contemporary energy crisis and finds Bond and Scaramanga to be instant enemies.
After some cheeky cat-and-mouse (made rendered by corny jokes, the return of Sheriff J.W. Pepper, and a slide whistle), Bond finally catches up to Scaramanga for the film’s climax on Khao Phing Kan, an island off the coast of Thailand now known as “James Bond Island” for this reason alone. Continue reading
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