MovieChat Forums > Mikey and Nicky (1976) Discussion > The bill at the Palace - SPOILER

The bill at the Palace - SPOILER


The marquee at the Palace Theatre where a hit was planned, listed 3 movies being shown: Time of the Iron Hand, The Laughing Policeman, and Triple Irons.

Time of the Iron Hand appears to be a made-up title. However the latter 2 were actual movies. Triple Irons was a Chinese film dubbed into English. Both were released in 1973.

Mikey and Nicky was a Paramount film, but The Laughing Policeman was made by 20th Century Fox. seems funny that Paramount would publicize a competitor's product.

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Doing a little research by googling parts of the title rather than the whole, when I looked up IRON HAND, I discovered that it was an alternate title (albeit in Japan) for the Bruce Lee movie better known as THE CHINESE CONNECTION, which was initially released in the U.S. in 1972, but could very easily have still been playing the grindhouse circuit a year later. As such, it is very possible that TIME OF THE IRON HAND was either an actual retitling of the movie by its then-distributor, or even a rogue retitling by another party to fake out martial arts fans into seeing it again. (In the '70's, prints of exploitation movies were often stolen and given "new" titles by theatres and drive-ins far away from the headquarters of the original rightsholders)

So my guess is that this was a real triple-feature playing at the Palace theatre, and May just captured that marquee and maybe grabbed footage of Beatty watching one of the movies on the fly. (Since the footage is from one of the martial arts movies, she and Paramount likely thought the distributors were so small-time, they wouldn't notice or care - she was smart not to grab footage from the Fox movie) In the '70's, movie clips were much cheaper to license - recall that around that time, Paramount had lots of footage of CASABLANCA in PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM, and scenes from RKO movies like KING KONG frequently popped up as stock footage in other movies of the era; nowadays, licensing for all those clips would be much more expensive.

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