There’s a great bit of dialogue in a long-forgotten but wonderful 30s screwball comedy called The Moon’s Our Home with Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan that seems to have been borrowed from Derb’s H.G. Wells line. The indelible Margaret Hamilton, later the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, takes a honeymooning couple around her wretched little Connecticut inn. “This is the Rose Room,” she says of a dumpy little hovel with floral wallpaper. She turns to them schoolmarmishly. “We call it that on account of the roses,” she says.
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John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.
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