Good thing HB wasn’t with me today…he would have really hated today’s movie. Actually, who knows with him. Maybe he would have liked it.
My mom and I saw The Golden Door today. Odd, but good. Or maybe it’s oddly good. It tells the story of Salvatore, who after seeing postcards of giant chickens and money growing on trees, decides to leave his rocky home in Sicily for a better life in America. He packs up his mother and two sons, and off they go. Along they way they seem to inherit two young girls who are going to America to be married, and a mysterious Englishwoman named Lucy. After a long (it was even long in the movie!) boat ride, they arrive at Ellis Island, where they are subjected to a bunch of shady physical and IQ tests, all designed to weed out the undesirables. Did I mention the movie is set in 1904?
There is some really trippy imagery interspersed throughout the story. After hearing that California has rivers of milk, Salvatore has some weird-ass dreams about swimming with Lucy in a river of milk with giant carrots. He also hallucinates about jumbo apples, so he was either worried about feeding his family or 1904 Sicily had good drugs. You think I’m kidding about the river of milk? Well, here’s the poster for the movie…
This morning I was reading the latest National Geographic, which has a very brief article about Ellis Island (mainly how the buildings are falling apart). It mentioned the medical inspections and showed pictures of the hospital ward. Kinda weird to watch a movie a few hours later that focused on that very topic.
