How to use a dictionary as a weapon

George Macready isn’t really a reverend holding a dictionary. He’s Matthew Stoker, a bad guy with a dictionary who’s pretending to be a reverend. Lee Bowman is Gilbert Archer, a newspaper columnist moonlighting as an amateur detective. Both men are looking for the Bibles that hold the answer to the whereabouts of a lost Leonardo painting of Joshua and the city of Jericho. From The Walls Came Tumbling Down (dir. Lothar Mendes, 1946). Click any image for a larger view.

[He’s a rather menacing “reverend,” isn’t he?]

Says Archer, “Joshua led his troops seven times around the city of Jericho. Remember, Reverend? Did you look on page seven of this dictionary?” Get the dictionary, riffle through the pages, point to something, and push the dictionary into your opponent’s face. Ow.


That's a Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Two giveaways: the cover design (visible in the first screenshot) and the frontispiece of Noah Webster (visible in the third). Archer is holding the dictionary upside-down, with its thumb notches slanting the wrong way. No matter: for his purposes, upside-down is fine.

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