CineLinkr #216: 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.
One Fine Day takes its title from the 1963 Carole King song, which you can hear in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney then give the phrase a stressful day with children attached. The song title is doing a heroic amount of optimism.
🟢 Easy: Michelle Pfeiffer performances
Movies: What Lies Beneath · One Fine Day · Married to the Mob · The Fabulous Baker Boys
Pfeiffer's lounge singer Susie Diamond in The Fabulous Baker Boys sits a long way from the woman suspecting a haunting in What Lies Beneath. The first has Jeff and Beau Bridges in the cast; the second pairs her with Harrison Ford under Robert Zemeckis's direction. A shared genre theory would take an awful lot of persuasion.
Married to the Mob makes her a gangster's widow, while One Fine Day puts her opposite Clooney in romantic comedy-drama. The casting answer cuts across all that. I like the row's range: four recognisable jobs for an actor, with quite different ideas about how much trouble the evening should contain.
🟡 Medium: Political assassination plots drive the story
Movies: Executive Action · The Day of the Jackal · The Jackal · Vantage Point
Executive Action presents a fictionalised Kennedy-assassination conspiracy from the conspirators' standpoint. In The Day of the Jackal, the OAS hires an assassin to kill Charles de Gaulle after an earlier attempt fails. The preparation and pursuit are the narrative engine, with Fred Zinnemann's 1973 film giving the job a methodical shape.
The 1997 Jackal is a loose remake, with Bruce Willis as the assassin and Richard Gere recruited to help catch him. Vantage Point revisits an apparent attack on the US president through different viewpoints. The row covers the plots and attempts; it doesn't require every planned killing to succeed. A recurring lesson is that having a complicated plan has never guaranteed a quiet day for anyone nearby.
🔵 Hard: Military courts try accused servicemen
Movies: The Caine Mutiny · Rules of Engagement · The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell · High Crimes
The Caine Mutiny leads from events aboard a Navy ship to a court-martial for mutiny. Rules of Engagement puts a Marine colonel's orders under scrutiny after civilians die outside an embassy. The institutional setting matters: commands and service responsibilities become part of what the court must judge.
The 1955 Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell dramatises the general's 1925 trial, with Gary Cooper in the title role. High Crimes, the 2002 film, has Ashley Judd's lawyer defend her husband before a military tribunal, bringing in Morgan Freeman's experienced military counsel because this isn't her usual legal territory.
Those details earn the group. Four films merely involving lawyers would be much easier to assemble. Here, the accused person's military service changes the court, the procedures and the pressures surrounding the case. It is an excellent row for anyone who thinks a thriller should periodically stop shouting and ask who actually has jurisdiction.
🟣 Tricky: Titles contain ordinal numbers
Movies: The First Wives Club · The Fourth Kind · The Fifth Element · The Sixth Sense
First, fourth, fifth, sixth: positions in a sequence. The title words connect these four without any need to turn a revenge comedy, an alien-encounter story and the other films into a common franchise. The gaps in the sequence don't matter.
The Fourth Kind borrows its wording from a classification of alien encounters, including abductions. It isn't promising the fourth film in a series. The Fifth Element is primarily set in the twenty-third century, which supplies more numbers but isn't the number you need for this answer.
One Fine Day is the nearby false friend. One is cardinal; first is ordinal. Reading that tiny grammatical distinction is more productive than trying to place Pfeiffer in The First Wives Club. The counting lesson has become oddly strict for a board that also contains two professional assassins called the Jackal.
The courtroom group is the one I'd keep discussing after the spelling trick is solved. It has four different ways for an institution to put its own conduct on trial too.
PixelLinkr's November 2 puzzle puts real boxing beside Sucker Punch's studio history, a considerably less formal way to introduce the next dispute.