Famous Boners (1942) User Reviews

People....get your minds out of the gutter!!

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 16 June 2019]

Despite the salacious title, "Famous Boners" is not a porno film. Instead, it's a short that talks about three very dissimilar cases which all have a common thread...mistakes. The first involves Thomas Carlyle's book about the French Revolution, the second a dopey prisoner who escaped and was soon recaptured and the third involved a spy ring in the US during WWI.

None of these famous mistakes were earthshattering but they all were mildly interesting. Not a great short but a decent time-passer if it comes on before or after something you really wanted to see on TCM.

Very offbeat episode in John Nesbitt's "Passing Parade" series...

[Doylenf · 5/10 · 20 May 2009]

A rather quirky short subject on famous boners made by people who had a hand in changing history--or so the narrator says.

One of the most painful mistakes was a writer who slaved for seven years hand-writing his manuscript, only to have a cleaning woman mistaking the paper-wrapped parcel on the floor as something to throw into the fireplace. He immediately sat down to rewrite his book on the French Revolution.

Another shows a prisoner sentenced to 230 years making an escape from prison in a guard's civilian clothes. He makes the mistake of thumbing a ride from a black limo which turns out to be inhabited by two police officers.

A case of smashing a sabotage ring occurs when a man mistakenly puts an envelope in the mail that has the FBI suspicious. Reason for the suspicion seems a bit off kilter to me--but anyway the ring is exposed and all because of a silly mistake made on the envelope.

The prisoner escape and the true life spy melodrama have only moderate interest in the way they're presented. A passing grade is all I can give this one.

Oops!

[boblipton · 5/10 · 15 June 2019]

Here's an amusing episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE series for MGM, in which he speaks about famous examples of errors throughout history, from Sir Isaac Newton boiling his pocket-watch instead of an egg, to German spies who, intending to blow up the Erie Canal failing because of a missing "S".

John Nesbitt was a grandson of Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth. He went to work as a broadcaster for NBC in 1933, and began his "Passing Parade" segments for the network in 1937, and it ran as part of various shows for the next dozen years. Eventually, MGM picked up the series as an occasional short subject, produced and narrated by Nesbitt. By 1949, Nesbitt had produced about sixty shorts. He died in 1960, two weeks short of his half-century mark.

Very Fun Entry

[Michael_Elliott · 23 May 2009]

Famous Boners (1942)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Another highly entertaining entry in John Nessbitt's Passing Parade series, this one looking at famous mistakes people make. These could be missing the top step and falling or timing how long to boil an egg but end up boiling the watch. The film centers on three events including a sabotage ring in the U.S. that gets busted over a simple mistake. A man serving five life sentences makes a successful escape from prison but they tries to hitch a ride. The first and most painful story is about a struggling writer who spends seven years writing a book on cheap paper. One day he falls asleep and a maid throws the paper into fire but the writer gets back up and rewrites it out of memory. The book would become The French Revolution. This is a very fun entry in the series as we get some nice drama in the story. I enjoyed the writers story the best because it was downright dramatic seeing the maid throw all that work into the fire. Very painful to watch as I'm sure anyone will be able to feel his pain. The two other stories aren't as good but they too are still fun. Mickey Rooney's father, Joe Yule, appears in the film.

This episode of the hungry catepillar digs up the inspiration for Joan Miro's . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 28 January 2020]

. . . baked pocket watch "art work" (or at least GRANDPA CALLED IT ART). Miro, of course, was a European pigment dauber ALMOST as famous as that "Big Eyes" painting wench (nee "Peggy Doris Hawkins"), about whom Tinsel Town released a recent theatrical flick (which is more than Mr., Mrs. or Ms. Miro--Joanie, that is, can say). As documented in FAMOUS BONERS, early Nobel Physics Prize winner Sir Isaac Newton boiled a ton of time pieces while researching his Theory of Relativity. (Newton was eventually knighted for single-handedly putting the British stem winder manufacturers on a nearly equal footing with the Swiss). Though there was no practical application for Newton's famous theorem ("E = MC squared") in the 1600s (due to lagging uranium enrichment technology), his experiments tricked the Swiss into painting the hands and numbers on their day minders with radium (to make them easier to read in boiling water), further increasing Great Britain's lead when it came to precision timing. (Due to their habit of sucking on the nibs of the tiny paint brushes which they were constantly poking in and out of their radium wells, the mouths of the average Swiss Miss soon gave rise to the term "Swiss Cheese.") You, too, can relearn all of this and more exciting trivia with which friends can be mesmerized, entranced or stumped simply by boning up on FAMOUS BONERS.

Little Mistakes Can Mean A Lot

[Eventuallyequalsalways · 8/10 · 20 May 2009]

This ten-minute-short narrated by John Nesbitt is one of the "Passing Parade" series. It opens with an apparent explanation of the "absent-minded professor" tag which we often associate with men of intellect, and the example given is that of Galileo Galilei who apparently loved a soft-boiled egg for his breakfast, and who meticulously timed the exact three-minutes required with his pocket watch. One morning, Galileo mistakenly boiled his watch for three minutes while holding the egg in his hand as he usually held the watch. In another example, the case of Thomas Carlyle is cited. Carlyle devoted seven years of his life to write his masterpiece entitled "The French Revolution." When completed, he took the manuscript, roughly wrapped in butcher's paper, to the home of a professor friend so he could be the first to see the completed project. His friend was not home when he arrived, so Carlyle fell asleep in front of the fireplace with the manuscript in his lap. During his sleep, the manuscript fell out of his lap onto the floor. The maid came along, tidying the room, and she mistakenly thought the crudely wrapped bundle was trash, so she heaved the whole thing into the fireplace, thus destroying seven years of work for Carlyle. Upon awakening and discovering the loss, over the next few months, working entirely from memory, he rewrote the entire book, and it went on to become the noted work of the author. In a third example, a prison inmate steals a guard's uniform and escapes from captivity. Since his sentences totaled 230 years, one would think he would be motivated to place as much distance as he possibly could between himself and the prison. Yet, the first passing car is tempting to him and he thumbs a ride only to find himself riding between two armed police officers who are not yet aware of the prison break, but who find out and nab the escapee before he is able to escape their company, and he is returned to prison to serve the remainder of his sentences. The last episode cited concerns wartime examination of mail by government censors who spot a letter from a foreign country which leads to capture of a ring of Nazi spies. The one little mistake which led to the investigation of the letter was the fact that the envelope was addressed to a certain "Mr.", but yet the salutation on the letter inside was marked as "Mrs.", and this minor omission of the "s" led to the suspicion of the inspector to flag the letter for followup by government agents.