Last night I finally solved a 20 year old mystery. I finally found the title of the movie I was searching for all this time.
One summer, when I was little I saw a movie. I must've liked it so much that some bits of it stuck in my memory. But I never remembered the title (not to mention it would have been useless anyway since it was a foreign film dubbed in Russian). Terry and I love talking film, we watch a lot of movies and can pretty much have a meaningful conversation comprised solely out of movie lines. One day I asked him about an old movie that was really funny and the only reference I gave him (the only part I remembered) was that it had a car that had cocaine in the tires and diamonds inside the battery. He didn't know, which totally surprised me. That was before the time when one could plug in random words into a browser and get a meaningful hit.
At some point Terry brought me The Man with One Red Shoe, hoping it was what I was talking about. It wasn't. But it was funny and it did have a car with cocaine in the tires. The Man with One Red Shoe was added to our ever growing DVD collection and I kept on searching.
Last night I mentioned it again. Dosing off, Terry suggested that perhaps it's the original French film that The Man with One Red Shoe was based on. I asked, what French film? He told me that if I go to Wikipedia, I should be able to track that down. I bolted out of bed and slowly crept into my office. There, in the dark, with my fish for company, I once again started my quest.
First there was a Wiki search, which did not yield the right results. Then I tried Google, which was completely pointless. It gave me hits for tires, not a movie. By this point I remembered that there was also a large diamond in the steering wheel of the car in the movie. I decided that perhaps I should switch gears and give Bing a try. I typed in "caper movie with cocaine in tires, diamond in steering wheel." Bingo! Bing solved in the first hit. My mystery movie was Le Corniaud, a french film from 1965. I even found a YouTube trailer, and all of a sudden I remembered most of the movie. I ran to the bedroom to inform Terry. "I found it!" But he was out cold. I fell asleep smiling ear to ear, finally at peace.
Now, how do I get my hands on the DVD?