From my room I can hear the trains running out to the seas of Europe

[sovay]

My arm hurts and my head aches more than usual and I just sneezed, which had better be the Pneumovax, but I wish to express my delight that someone who runs a site dedicated to men's fashions on film and TV has devoted an entry to Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) because I adore him in that movie and one of the things I adore about him is how good he doesn't look:



Look, I have one husband who can wear orange plaid and the other owns a tie we call the blue-ringed octopus: I'm not biased against the flamboyant. I am biased against a tie that matches a box of aspirin and looks like it was chosen so its owner could put all the mustard on his hot dog he wanted without risk. I am biased against a shirt that if it came on your TV screen at sign-off you would call the repairman the next day. The tweed jacket not pictured is a saving grace because it covers most of the shirt, but not even a raincoat improves the effect of the tie. The most I would ever attempt to argue for this ensemble is that it looks exactly like its character and avoids public indecency. But I am charmed by the analysis, even if I feel that "coordinating" is an optimistic designation for what that tie is doing. Now I just want to watch the film again.

Comments

[davidgillon]

I think I have that shirt.

[sovay]

I think I have that shirt.

I bet it looks better on you than on Lieutenant Zach Garber of the New York City Transit Police!

[davidgillon]

I do like it ;)

On checking my wardrobe, it's actually a much smaller pattern than Matthau's, which I think stops it being quite so garish.

[sovay]

On checking my wardrobe, it's actually a much smaller pattern than Matthau's, which I think stops it being quite so garish.

That's neat: the colors are more integrated with one another, instead of fighting it out all over the shirt?

[davidgillon]

It's a much finer, much more complex pattern, without those big blocks of colour. The bigger blocks are still about an inch, but there are 16 different elements horizontally and vertically within those blocks before it repeats, lines and hashes and different printed effects. From a distance it all just merges together into an autumnal browny-orange.

It does help it doesn't have that teal blue mixed among the reds though!