The Man from the South, from Rio, and from Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino was all the rage following the great success of Pulp Fiction. One of his goals, he said in his numerous interviews during that period, had been to adapt a novel into a film, which he accomplished in 1997 with Jackie Brown, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. In a way, however, Tarantino had shot an adaptation even before that, when he wrote, directed, and starred in the 1995 short film, The Man from Hollywood, the final of four segments in Four Rooms.
In The Man from Hollywood, Tarantino played Chester Rush, a fictional movie star who wants to reenact “The Man from Rio”, a 1960 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with his friends Norman and Leo and a woman in the hotel they had just met. The actual title of the Hitchcock episode (freely available) was “Man from the South,” which was adapted from the 1948 short story of the same name by Roald Dahl (Amazon).
In Dahl’s story, a man of Latin or South American descent bets a young stranger that he can’t light his lighter ten times in a row. If the stranger succeeds with his lighter, he will win the other man’s luxury vehicle. But if the stranger fails, the man from the south will get to chop off the stranger’s little finger. The main event takes place in a hotel room, where the men are accompanied by a woman as well as a third man who serves as referee.
While The Man from Hollywood is not a literal adaptation of either the story or the television episode, Tarantino’s segment has much in common with them, as well as notable differences.
First, while the Dahl story, the Hitchcock episode, and the Tarantino segment each take place in a hotel, the specific hotel settings vary. Dahl’s story begins outside by the hotel pool, while the Hitchcock episode begins in the hotel restaurant. In both versions the characters relocate to an upstairs hotel room where “there’s no wind or draft.” Tarantino’s short film takes place entirely in the hotel’s luxurious and spacious penthouse, although the earlier segments of Four Rooms take place elsewhere in the same hotel.
The time of day also varies in the three versions. Dahl began his story in the early evening:
It was getting on toward six o’clock so I thought I’d buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deck chair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.
The Hitchcock episode, by contrast, takes place earlier in the day; at the beginning of the episode one of the characters observes, “You’re a lot to cope with at eight o’clock in the morning.” A subsequent reference to “half past eight in the morning” confirms that the episode takes place before lunch. Tarantino’s film segment, by contrast, takes place after midnight on New Year’s Eve, or, rather, very early on New Year’s Day.
Finally, Dahl’s tale takes place in Jamaica, Hitchcock’s in Las Vegas, and Tarantino’s in Los Angeles.
In each version, everybody is drinking. The first sentence of Dahl’s story establishes that the narrator is having a beer. The nameless woman in the Hitchcock television episode is ordering brandy at the bar at “eight in the morning;” the gambler invites her to join him for a pot of coffee, saying “you should have that brandy after breakfast, not before.” Later, drinks are delivered to the hotel room. In Tarantino’s The Man from Hollywood, the three men have been drinking for hours, and Chester and Norman both slur their speech at times.
The three “gamblers” in each version resemble each other in that none is nearly as well off financially as the men they bet against. However, “the gambler” is the main character in only one of the three versions of the tale.
In Dahl’s 1948 story, the unnamed gambler is estimated by the narrator to be nineteen or twenty years old, an American learning to be a sailor whose ship has just docked in the nearby Jamaica harbor. But he is clearly not the story’s protagonist. Neither is the story’s first-person narrator, an unnamed character who eventually serves as referee of the bet; as with Heart of Darkness or The Great Gatsby, a first-person narrator is very often not a story’s principal character. The referee is of course not entirely inconsequential; he is the first to meet the man from the south, and he is subsequently joined by the sailor and an English woman before the four of them move to Carlos’s hotel room. But although he tells the story, the referee is otherwise unimportant. The focus of Dahl’s story, instead, is on Carlos, the “Man from the South,” the man with an exotic background, and the only party to the bet who is given a name.
In the 1960 Hitchcock episode, by contrast, the camera focuses primarily on Steve McQueen’s character, who is called only “the gambler.” In this version, the gambler clearly is the episode’s main character. McQueen’s character looks older than how the sailor is described in the original story, and indeed McQueen was thirty years old when the episode was released.
In Tarantino’s The Man from Hollywood, however, the gambler is once again not the main character, even though this time he is given a name: Norman, surely an intentional nod to Norman Lloyd, the director of the 1960 episode. Norman is played by Paul Calderón, who was in his forties at the time and who had had a memorable role in Pulp Fiction (“My name’s Paul, and this is between y’all”). Nor is Ted the Bellhop, portrayed with wide-eyed innocence by Tim Roth, the main character, even though he is the only character who appears in each of the four segments of Four Rooms.
The main character of The Man from Hollywood is, instead, the one played by Tarantino himself: Chester Rush. This character has far more dialogue than Ted the Bellhop and dominates the short film’s screen time. Interestingly, Tarantino’s Chester Rush translates to the antagonist in the other two versions, the men who bet their cars. And, while Chester is called Chester from the start of the segment, the other two iterations of the titular character—Peter Lorre’s character in the 1960 episode and the parallel character in Dahl’s story—go nameless until the end of the stories, when in both the wife enters and identifies him as Carlos.
Protagonist or not, the man who bets his car is the man to whom the title of both the story and the episode refer: “Man from the South.” In Tarantino’s The Man from Hollywood, the characters actually discuss the earlier Hitchcock episode, except that they refer to the title of the Hitchcock episode as “The Man from Rio.” In the Hitchcock episode, Carlos’s place of origin is never actually specified. “Rio” is belied, however, by the reference of the wife in the Hitchcock episode to “the islands where we used to live.”
The man from the South who bets his car is a sharply drawn character in both Dahl’s story and the Hitchcock episode.
Dahl’s story describes Carlos as
a small, oldish man…immaculately dressed in a white suit and he walked very quickly with little bouncing strides, pushing himself high up on his toes with each step. He had on a large creamy Panama hat.
The character also has an accent—the narrator “couldn’t tell if the accent was Italian or Spanish”—and Carlos’s dialogue is written in the vernacular:
“Dese is no hotel people.”
The narrator goes on to say:
but I felt fairly sure he was some sort of a South American.
In the 1960 Hitchcock episode Peter Lorre matches Dahl’s earlier description of a “small, oldish man” who speaks with an accent, though in real life Lorre was of Hungarian descent, not South American. Lorre’s Carlos wears a black suit, however, and does not wear a hat, nor does he walk in “little bouncing strides.” When the gambler brags that his lighter “never misses,” it is Carlos who bets that the gambler can’t successfully light his lighter ten times in a row. In Dahl’s story the car the gambler stands to win is a pale-green Cadillac. In the Hitchcock episode it is an unspecified “beautiful convertible; it’s this year’s model.” In Tarantino’s Four Rooms segment, it’s a 1964 Chevy Chevelle. Eventually it is revealed that neither Carlos actually owns the cars they are betting, though there is no reason to believe Chester doesn’t own his Chevelle.
If the gambler loses, however, Carlos or Chester gets to cut off “de little finger of your left hand.” Carlos is not a typical villain. He is not holding hostage the gambler, who is free to decline the bet, even up to the point of igniting the lighter for the first time.
Tarantino’s Chester Rush character does not resemble Carlos at all. Referencing the Hitchcock episode, Chester says:
I’m not like Peter Lorre on that TV show. I’m not some sick fuck travelin’ the countryside collecting fingers.
Tarantino has often drawn from his favorite films of his youth, and his film characters often discuss movies and television shows. In this instance, however, he goes so far as to have the characters reenact a scene they are talking about; Tarantino uses the same storytelling technique in Death Proof with the characters wanting to reenact a scene from the 1971 movie Vanishing Point, before actually doing it.
And as a description of Carlos, “sick fuck” is not far from the mark. Carlos is not killing or stealing. He is perfectly transparent regarding the stakes of the bet. But his fondness for cutting off fingers makes it clear that he is mentally ill. In both the story and the episode, his wife calls him “a menace.”
Chester, on the other hand, is a good friend of Norman’s, the man with whom he makes the bet. Although Chester’s language and behavior throughout the short film suggest that he has moral shortcomings, he does not come off as mentally ill.
The third man of the group in each version is the referee. In the original story, the referee is the first-person narrator, and therefore the first character to appear. In the television episode the referee is the last of the four to join the group, though he is evident in the periphery from the moment the gambler and woman move from the bar to a table. He overhears the initial bet proposal and wants to get in on the action, but when the stakes escalate, he is asked to referee. He asks the gambler if he’s sure he wants to go through with the bet, but otherwise the character largely resides in the background.
But who is the referee in The Man from Hollywood? Bruce Willis’s Leo is the third man present, which might suggest that his character is analogous to the referee’s. He is the one who finally explains the group’s intentions to Ted the Bellhop, so he is serving as supervisor. Leo is excited to see the bet through, though, and does nothing to discourage Norman, nor does he seek assurance that Norman really wants to go through with it as they are ready to begin.
Ted the Bellhop is called up to bring the necessary supplies. In the Hitchcock episode, an unnamed bellhop is asked to bring “some nails, a hammer, a length of good strong cord, and a chopping knife…a butcher’s chopping knife.” The bellhop later calls it a “meat axe.” In Dahl’s story it is a “coloured maid” who brings them a hammer, a bag of nails, and a chopping knife, but not string; they find string in the room. They are both promptly dismissed once their task is completed.
Ted does not bring a hammer, but he does bring nails—
Norman: Why three nails?
Chester: That’s what Peter Lorre asked for.
—as well as a ball of twine, a block of wood (a cutting board), a bucket of ice with a bottle of Cristal, a donut, a club sandwich, and a hatchet, described as “a knife as sharp as the devil himself.” The nails and the string or cord are to secure the gambler’s hand to the table so that if he loses the bet he won’t pull his hand away when the knife comes down. Neither of those things are deemed necessary for Chester’s and Norman’s purposes. Due to alcohol-induced bravery, it is assumed Norman will not chicken out once the igniting is under way.
Carlos is ready and eager to cut off the gambler’s finger if the lighter doesn’t light. But Chester doubts his ability to cut off Norman’s finger:
If I lose, I lose. That’s fine. That’s no problem. I have no problem with that. I’m a big boy. I knew exactly what the hell I was doing. But if I win, I want to win. All right?…If I win, well, it’s not inconceivable that at the last minute maybe neither Leo or I will be able to wield the axe.
One of the key differences in Tarantino’s pseudo-retelling is that there are five people in the hotel room for the climactic scene, rather than four. Ted, unlike the unnamed bellhop and the “coloured maid” is not dismissed.
Leo is eagerly awaiting the game, while the referees in Dahl’s story and the Hitchcock episode voice their disapproval. When Ted the Bellhop is called up to the penthouse and is told that “we want you to be the dice man,” he initially doesn’t approve either, saying “I’ve got to get out of here,” and immediately stands to walk out. Thus for Tarantino’s version, the character of the referee is split into two, Leo and Ted.
The character of the woman has a name only in Four Rooms, Angela, and is the only character besides Ted to appear in more than one segment of the full-length film. In Dahl’s story, the woman enters with the American sailor, but is barely mentioned and essentially ignored until she finally speaks a few pages later, voicing her disapproval of the bet:
“Well,” I said. “I think it’s a crazy bet. I don’t like it very much.”
“Nor do I,” said the English girl. It was the first time she’d spoken. “I think it’s a stupid, ridiculous bet.”
The American sailor and the English woman don’t know each other very well, having seemingly just met that day. Nevertheless, the American asks her to accompany him to the hotel room with the others. Even up there, though, she says very little and does even less. When Roald Dahl began imagining this story, he must have pictured four people in the scene, but once he began typing he didn’t actually have anything for the woman to do.
The woman in the Hitchcock episode also goes nameless, though this time the character is American. Played by Neile Adams—Steve McQueen’s wife at the time—she comes off as more relevant this time. She is the first person seen in the episode, sitting on a barstool alone and looking miserable as she orders a brandy with her few remaining coins. She nearly loses her shoe before the gambler catches it, refits it onto her foot, and invites her to join him for coffee. She says she is in Nevada because of “some sort of a cultural exchange” that brought her there from Moscow, Idaho, but that she is now stranded because “they forgot to mention it was a 730 mile-walk home.” Nothing more is revealed of her backstory.
The attraction between Adams’s woman and McQueen’s gambler is apparent; he even says later on that “she looks so sweet and sexy.” Even though they are alone for only a short time before Peter Lorre’s Carlos joins them, when they are upstairs they act as if they’ve known each other longer than just that morning. As the main event is getting closer and closer, the gambler is visibly nervous about losing his finger, and his nervousness is mirrored by the woman. At different moments, she tells him “let’s get out of here” and “don’t listen to him,” and she refers to Carlos as a “monster.”
It is unclear how Angela, in Four Rooms, met Chester and his entourage and ended up in the hotel’s penthouse. She has a few lines throughout the short film, including the final words of encouragement to Ted before he agrees to do it, but she is the only character to have fewer lines than Ted. Really, other than the hilarious moment at the beginning of the final Four Rooms segment when Angela answers the door and Ted briefly loses his mind in anger at seeing her again—because of what happened in the film’s second segment—neither she nor the other versions of the woman serve a real function in the story.
Finally, at the climax of the tale, the characters in Tarantino’s version are the only ones to think that, if Norman’s lighter lets him down, they should put the severed finger on ice and take it to a hospital to sew it back on:
No one wants Norman to lose his finger. We just want to chop it off. You know, if fate doesn’t smile on old Norman, we’ll put that fucker on ice, whisk it right to the hospital, where in all likelihood they’ll be able to sew it right back on.
Re-attaching the finger doesn’t occur to the characters in Dahl’s story or Hitchcock’s episode, and clearly Carlos has no such intention.
In Dahl’s story, Carlos’s wife scolds him like a child as she puts an end to the festivities, and he sulks like one:
I just wanted to make a little bet.
She then explains that Carlos has taken forty-seven fingers and lost eleven cars—the same numbers are given in both the story and episode. In Tarantino’s segment, even though Chester says that Peter Lorre’s character was “collecting fingers,” whether Carlos saved the fingers or disposed of them afterward is not clarified.
The referee’s most important function comes here at the climax. In the 1960 television episode the referee, played by Tyler McVey, counts slowly and emphatically, prior to the gambler igniting the lighter. In Dahl’s story, the referee counts after each ignition, up to eight. In the Hitchcock episode, the referee counts to seven before Carlos’s long-suffering wife bursts into the room and puts a stop to everything. Despite being seventy percent of the way to winning a convertible, McQueen’s gambler appears relieved to have the proceedings put to an end. He is sweating and, once untied, throws the cord in embarrassment. The gambler on the written page, eighty percent of the way to a Cadillac, exudes more confidence in general; the narrator doesn’t pay him much attention once the wife enters.
In Tarantino’s segment, however, Norman doesn’t produce a flame from his lighter even once. Ted the Bellhop had, in a way, become a second gambler, betting for a thousand dollars that he wouldn’t have to cut off a finger. Yet, following Chester’s convincing speech, Ted the Dice Man reaches total nihilism after his New Year’s Eve from hell—he was about to quit when the call from the penthouse came down—and he is so amped up as he holds the knife, as sharp as the devil himself, above Norman’s finger that one can’t help thinking he was going to bring the cleaver down whether Norman achieved a flame or not.
Despite later becoming known as “the World’s Most Scrumdiddlyumptious Storyteller” for his children’s books, “Man from the South” is Roald Dahl’s most adapted work. It has been adapted several times for both screen and radio in addition to what has been discussed here, including for episodes of Roald Dahl’s “Tales of the Unexpected” in 1979 and a second iteration of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1985. Concerning these two adaptations, three details are of particular note: whether the version’s title begins with the word “the” is inconsistent; the 1979 version takes place in Jamaica, as the original story did; and in the 1985 version the gambler asks the referee for an ice bucket to put his finger in if he loses, because there is a hospital nearby. Carlos, however, says that that will not be allowed:
No, it’s mine. If you lose, you lose the finger. I keep it. That’s the bet.
Four Rooms was a critical and commercial flop, and sadly it will likely go down only as a footnote in Quentin Tarantino’s career. Not all four segments of Four Rooms are great, but The Man from Hollywood is vintage Tarantino, and because of that, in addition to its connection to both Roald Dahl and Alfred Hitchcock, it is well worth studying.
Buy it on BluRay:
2023 Australian release: Amazon.com (or here) | Amazon.co.uk (or here) | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr
2012 German release: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr
2021 German release: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk (or here) | Amazon.de (there’s also a range of limited editions from a smaller label) | Amazon.fr
P.S.: To this date there is no proper US or UK release of this movie on HD home video, so you need to import. We’ve included links above to decent discs (all English friendly).
