What did Mickey Spillane mean by this word?
April 23, 2016 8:46 AM Subscribe
Okay, so I'm working on new subtitles for Robert Aldrich's noir classic "Kiss Me Deadly". Around 50 minutes in, Mike Hammer drops in on a character named Carl Evello, and encounters a sexy girl who introduces herself like this:
After a few listens I figured it out: The word she is actually saying is "hatch": "Same mother, different hatch." (The dialog list, prepared in 1955, bears this out.)
Now, for the purposes of my subtitles, I'm just going to write "same father", because that's what the viewers are going to hear. But I'd love to figure out what the writer (either Mickey Spillane, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, or whomever) meant by this peculiar turn of phrase.
Do you suppose a "hatch" is like a batch of hatching eggs, so she "hatched" from a different batch? Or is it something altogether dirtier? Or did it just sound dirty, enough to make United Artists decide to re-dub the line?
"I'm Friday. I'd have been named Tuesday if I'd been born on Tuesday. I'm Carl's sister. Half sister. Same mother, different father."The thing is, while her voice said "father", her lips were obviously pronouncing a different word, that was later overdubbed as "father".
After a few listens I figured it out: The word she is actually saying is "hatch": "Same mother, different hatch." (The dialog list, prepared in 1955, bears this out.)
Now, for the purposes of my subtitles, I'm just going to write "same father", because that's what the viewers are going to hear. But I'd love to figure out what the writer (either Mickey Spillane, screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, or whomever) meant by this peculiar turn of phrase.
Do you suppose a "hatch" is like a batch of hatching eggs, so she "hatched" from a different batch? Or is it something altogether dirtier? Or did it just sound dirty, enough to make United Artists decide to re-dub the line?
Merriam-Webster has "a brood of hatched young" which seems to fit here.
posted by in278s at 9:24 AM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by in278s at 9:24 AM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]
Best answer: The book's line is "We had the same mother but came from different hatches."
posted by Carol Anne at 9:26 AM on April 23, 2016 [13 favorites]
posted by Carol Anne at 9:26 AM on April 23, 2016 [13 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks, Carol Anne. I was hoping someone would have a copy handy.
That wording is much clearer.
posted by Silky Slim at 9:38 AM on April 23, 2016
That wording is much clearer.
posted by Silky Slim at 9:38 AM on April 23, 2016
I totally looked this up in the context of a music lyric and it was indeed some weird old timey slang meant to say they had different fathers. I can't remember the song now, but this phrase or something similar was A Thing.
posted by jbenben at 11:41 AM on April 23, 2016
posted by jbenben at 11:41 AM on April 23, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
Yeah that's my reading of it. This scene has a lot of erotic innuendo, both gay and straight, in it, if I remember, and maybe "hatch" just seemed too nasty in that context, what with all the other sex talk.
I could see "hatch" as slang for female genitalia, but that wouldn't make sense in the context at all.
posted by dis_integration at 9:04 AM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]