From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). Alone in the city and down on her luck, Sadie (Joan Crawford) visits the Automat. Click any image for a larger view.
[Unless you have the free time and financial wherewithal to track down an original, this is as close as you’ll ever get to an Automat coffee spigot.]
[Coffee cost a nickel.]
[And the twin spigots dispensed both coffee and cream.]
[Civilization = cup and saucer.]
[I like that lettering. And I like the pedestals. I think that they were still around when I made what I remember as my one and only visit to an Automat, in the early 1980s with my friend Aldo Carrasco.]
This scene comes to a bitter end: Sadie sees a half-eaten piece of pie — food! — and the man who’s leaving it behind crushes out his cigarette in it. Is he nasty, or merely oblivious? Hard to say.
Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)
Friday, October 18, 2024
Joan Crawford at the Automat
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comments: 2
I wonder if the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, was influenced by automats at all. The Enterprise crew get their food from an automated slotted door, from which, in the famous episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", Capt. Kirk orders a cup of coffee and a chicken sandwich---and gets cute furry tribble creatures instead. (They have infested the ship.)
Roddenberry was the right age--b. 1921--but grew up in LA...
Googled--the AI said, "There isn't much info about famous automats in Los Angeles".
Still, he might have known about them.
Also found--did you know (you probably already blogged about it!) the 2022 movie ‘The Automat,’ a documentary about Horn & Hardart's?
it sounds to as if he must've known about them. And yes, the Automat movie is in here somewhere.
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