CineLinkr #209: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Divorce Italian Style gives Marcello Mastroianni a husband who cannot legally divorce his wife, so he starts planning her murder. A rational person might reconsider the new relationship. Ferdinando treats the legal situation as a creative writing prompt. This is the point at which the custody lawyers elsewhere on the board begin to look reassuring.
🟢 Easy: Titles begin with a color word
Movies: Red Dragon · Pink Flamingos · Yellow Submarine · Purple Rain
Red, pink, yellow, purple. First word, four titles. Put John Waters's Pink Flamingos beside the Beatles' Yellow Submarine and the connection had better be something you can identify without arranging a family screening.
The Beatles supplied the songs for Yellow Submarine, but actors voiced their animated counterparts. Purple Rain gives Prince a live-action showcase; Red Dragon takes us into Hannibal Lecter's orbit. You can spend a long time hunting for a musical or animal connection here. The color words are already waiting at the front, indifferent to whether the rest of the film is suitable for anybody's children.
🟡 Medium: Central couples ending their marriages
Movies: Kramer vs. Kramer · Marriage Story · The War of the Roses · Divorce Italian Style
Kramer vs. Kramer follows Ted and Joanna's separation into a custody dispute. Marriage Story makes Nicole and Charlie's divorce a bi-coastal affair, with lawyers translating private hurt into a case. The central couple's marriage is coming apart in both, and the child has to live with what follows.
The War of the Roses turns the shared home into contested territory. Divorce Italian Style goes further into murderous calculation because legal divorce is unavailable to Ferdinando. That distinction explains the label: these are central couples ending their marriages, rather than four films about divorce proceedings. A court is optional. The refusal to keep living together is the engine.
🔵 Hard: Swashbuckling sword adventures
Movies: Captain Blood · The Adventures of Robin Hood · The Count of Monte Cristo · The Three Musketeers
Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Basil Rathbone appear in both Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Captain Blood gives Flynn a doctor turned pirate; Robin Hood sends him against corrupt authority in green. Rathbone is an excellent person to have nearby when the story requires somebody who looks offended by your continued existence.
The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers take their source novels from Alexandre Dumas. These are the 2002 and 1993 versions, respectively. Edmond's revenge and d'Artagnan's duels belong to the same adventure tradition even without Flynn supplying the grin.
Swashbuckling is the useful word. A sword appearing in a period film would not be enough: the duels, daring heroes and confrontations with villains determine the style of the adventure. After the marriage row's weaponized household, an opponent openly holding a blade almost feels courteous.
🟣 Tricky: Modern families shaped by adoption
Movies: Lion · Juno · Philomena · Martian Child
Lion follows Saroo Brierley's search for his Indian birth family after his childhood adoption in Australia. It adapts his memoir A Long Way Home. Philomena approaches separation from the birth mother's side, with a search nearly fifty years after the convent gave her son up for adoption.
Juno faces the decision before the adoption happens. Martian Child follows a widowed writer trying to become a father to Dennis, a boy who says he comes from Mars. The latter adapts David Gerrold's 1994 novelette, rather than the expanded novel published in 2002.
The click comes when you stop looking for four matching searches. Two films trace family ties after separation; the other two concern making an adoptive family. Adoption shapes each central story, but the films give it different emotional stakes. Juno also contains the prospective adoptive couple's breakup. That subplot does not make Juno and Paulie a married couple, and it does not move the film into the previous row.
Philomena's search is the one I would carry away from this board. A family connection can remain urgent long after everyone else has decided the paperwork settled it.
If Ferdinando's approach to endings has exhausted you, the same date's PixelLinkr puzzle offers fishing and passenger transport before its own troubled protagonists wake with amnesia.