The thiefy movies thread

[Melan]

I have opened this thread because I have thought people might be interested in sharing information and their thoughts about movies which are inspiring for TDM or the Thief Games. Some of them, like The Third Man (which inspired The Dark Project's city architecture, features a character named Baron von Kurtz who is suspiciously similar to Constantine, and even has a line that goes "Come out, come out, whoever you are!") are probably known to a lot of people here, but others may be obscure, or just not completely obvious.

 

So, have at it. I will start with two of my recent discoveries, Louise Feuillade's serial movies.

[Melan]

Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade: this crime serial (ten episodes ranging from 12 to some 55 minutes in length, totalling 5.5 hours) was made in 1915, and for all its age, it is absolutely excellent. I was a bit skeptical, but as a fan of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films, whioch count these as their progenitor, I took the risk on both this 3-DVD boxed set and the Fantômas collection (of which I will write later), and it proved worth the time and money.

 

The Vampires are a gang of master criminals plaguing Paris, and it is up to Philippe Guerande, reporter at Le Mondial, and later his sidekick, the stereotypically French Mazamette to stop them. What follow are plots full of criminal heists, car and bicycle chases, vengeance, counter-vengeance, thrilling escapes and detective work. The world of Les Vampires is oddly empty of normal life (I don't know if it was the war, the season or a demand of the film crew which cleared the people off the streets, but Paris looks positively eerie this way), but completely full of thieves and other criminals. The Vampires have several grandiose schemes going on, using multiple identities, aliases and hideouts, and the authorities are helpless to stop them.

 

Guerande is an alert and upstanding, if straight-laced character with Mazamette as comic relief (and often deus ex machina), but the real stars are the Vampires, and particularly Irma Vep, bar singer and master thief. She might be the very first movie example of the female cat burglar stereotype - beautiful, deadly, alert and fiendishly clever, as effective creeping across a rooftop in a skintight black suit as inflitrating a household as a maid. She steals the show so thoroughly that it feels almost like cheating when she is thwarted. Silent movie heroines always have something about them, but Irma Vep may be one of the few who can come close to Louise Brooks in allure, and she is refreshingly modern.

 

From the descriptions above, Les Vampires may feel like an action movie, and that's right. It is full of non-stop, breakneck action, stunts and improbable devices (like an apartment which hides a long-distance cannon, or a trap door at the entrance of a middle-class home). You can see traces of all kinds of later genres here - spy movies, crime, urban thrillers - in a very clean, very archetypal form that still works without a hitch. But what makes it so enthralling is that there is a darker undercurrent beneath all this. Unlike films which stylise crime until it is removed from reality and (therefore) doesn't feel effective, the criminals in this serial are merciless and murder anyone who gets in their way without regret, or even making long speeches about it. There is a sense of fear about how effective crime can become when combined with the anonymity of modern cities and the wonders of technology, a sort of mechanised and invisible menace. And there are always the character's eyes, darting around and surveying the dangerous environment and if they are being followed - the lines between thieves and Guerande are blurred as he starts using the Vampires' methods against them, and, much like Dr. Mabuse seven years later, the air is thick with paranoia. And of course, it is a storehouse of all things thiefy: secret doors, traps, thrilling escapes, hidden compartments, characters studying mysterious maps and more.

 

In this release (Gaumont's restoration, UK release by The Mechanical Eye), the masterful musical score underlines this feeling of "wrongness" by tense and haunting themes as characters stalk along walls, peer through windows or hide behind curtains. And Irma Vep's slightly vulgar harmonica theme is great, foreshadowing her menace. This is why music matters in silents - you can use a general piano theme, but you really shouldn't. Unfortunately, the episodes on Youtube are in execrable quality and with very poor musical support - avoid. But this release, I cannot but recommend it. It is goddamn good.

 

Images:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Melan]

And a few more images (there were so many to choose from):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Melan]

Fantômas, also by Louis Feuillade, and from 1913-1914. Five longer episodes (Fantômas: In the Shadow of the Guillotine, Juve versus Fantômas, The Murderous Corpse, Fantômas versus Fantômas and The False Magistrate), essentially a series of five movies, totalling five and a half hours. They are based on a series of pulp novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, with a strong artistic license. Both the pulps and the movies were very popular with the Surrealists, who regarded it as a kind of "accidental art" developing from modern society; fans included Cocteau, Bunuel and Dalí.

 

Much like Les Vampires, this is a strung-together sequence of heist stories, murders, kidnappings, poisoning and impersonation, but with only one central antagonist. Fantômas is a character who murders without compunction, and unlike in Les Vampires, tends to get away with it as his nemesis, the smart but unlucky Inspector Juve and his journalist friend Jerome Fandôr try to track him down but fail or are outwitted at the crucial moments. The tone is maybe even darker; there is a lurid fascination with macabre death and grisly violence (chapters within individual films: The Bleeding Wall, The Glove Made of Human Skin etc.), and there is no comic relief, unless you count things like a thief stuck on the clasp of a giant bell and smashed to purée as it is rang, showering the church crowd below with blood and stolen jewelry comic. (The 1960s movie with Louis de Funes is considerably more light-hearted, and bears little relation to the tone of the original. This is the bloody sensationalism of dime novels and urban horror.)

 

The interesting thing about Fantômas is that he is not just effectively faceless behind his hundred disguises, but he is without a backstory, or much of a psychological profile. We don't get to know much about him, and that's what makes him so effective. There is no need to complicate him - that comes with the action. He is almost like an embodiment of crime, and he could be anywhere - a banker, a priest, a socialite, a street lowlife or a policeman (he is all of these and more in the movies). The movies are full of anxiety; crime is triumphant, it pays, and Fantômas gets to delight in it. There is definitely something off about the atmosphere; where the Paris of Les Vampires is desolate, this feels dreamlike, somewhere between probable and improbable.

 

The cinematography is less advanced than it would be in Les Vampires (this is an earlier work, made in 1913-1914), using few camera tricks, but it is solid, and doesn't have the jangly, completely overacted quality of many silents. And Fantômas is just sinister. Unfortunately, parts of the last two episodes have been lost beyond recovery (the films themselves have only survived due to some kind of lucky accident before the stock was to be discarded as useless junk), and these parts are replaced by intertitles and in one case, rerunning old footage. Sometimes, there is heavy damage on the stock. That said, it is watchable, and great inspiration for fan missions - although I wish we could have AI advanced enough to factor in disguises - and be dumbe enough to be fooled by it.

 

Again, the music is out of this world; menacing, raging between hollow suspense and a dark dynamism. Unlike Les Vampires, it is a bit more available. Watch the trailer

for a taste, or the first episode, In the Shadow of the Guillotine, which is found on Youtube. Not quite DVD quality, and it is not the absolutely sublime Juve vs. Fantômas, but it is the restored version, soundtrack and all. If you can spare 50 minutes, check it out..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 15, 2012 by Melan

[demagogue]

In the Name of the Rose was mentioned as an influence.

[Andrey]

 

 

http://hi.baidu.com/...%20Todd/index/0

Edited January 22, 2012 by Andrey

[demagogue]

Is that your site Andrey?

That would solve this mystery: http://www.ttlg.com/...ad.php?t=138136

(And don't worry about Shadowhide's post. He's like that to everyone.)

 

Edit: Looking at your Darkmod profile, unless you are clearing yourself haha...

Or just another guy from Darkfate.

[Glyph Seeker]

These are all making me want to rewatch my Call of Cthulhu DVD!

 

 

But then it was always the Lost City and lovecraftian fear in Thief that made me so excited.

[Sir Taffsalot]

I like Dark City. The atmosphere and the dark narrow streets with the huge buildings everywhere give me that claustrophobic feel I get when I play city levels such as Bikers and Melans.

[Melan]

Glyph Seeker: Oh yes, that Call of Cthulhu movie was grand. In fact, I have just been planning to rewatch it these days... might as well take the opportunity.

[STiFU]

It was about time a thread like this came up.

 

I didn't know there was a Cthulhu movie. Cool! I am a big fan of the game and got two lovecraft books afterwards! Are you talking about the Movie from 2005? There's also some weird movie called "The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu" on imdb and it is listed as horror, adventure, commedy and it has a drawn cover. I suppose it's an animated movie. Anyone know anything about it?

[Glyph Seeker]

It was about time a thread like this came up.

 

I didn't know there was a Cthulhu movie. Cool! I am a big fan of the game and got two lovecraft books afterwards! Are you talking about the Movie from 2005? There's also some weird movie called "The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu" on imdb and it is listed as horror, adventure, commedy and it has a drawn cover. I suppose it's an animated movie. Anyone know anything about it?

 

I am most definitely talking about the 2005 one. It's a wonderful silent movie done by enthusiasts on a tiny budget. I can't wait to watch their latest movie based on The Whisperer in Darkness.

 

I wish I could recommend to you the Penguin Classics versions of Lovecraft's writings edited by S.T. Joshi but if you're reading them in German that would probably make things more difficult for you. =-X

[Melan]

Since it has been mentioned, I'll post my impressions on the The 2005 Call of Cthulhu movie.

 

In our time, Cthulhu has lost all his menace and been reduced to a quaint in-joke, an inglorious end to a story about cosmic terror. All the more notable then that the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society has created a movie adaptation that's not just faithful to the original short story, but it is also faithful to the era that produced it. The result is a black and white silent movie, created mostly with the technology of the 1920s and presented in its idiom, fake-looking sets and all. And for all the practical or creative risks a project like this would entail, it succeeds.

 

Call of Cthulhu is generally considered unfilmable as a story based on three completely different plot lines, and the piecing together of information to arrive at horrific conclusions. The movie works them together admirably: a narrator, telling his tale of discovery in an asylum and beseeching his doctor to destroy his materials, serves as a way to link the story together and a point to relate to it. The creators use montage and other relatively simple techniques to illustrate documentary analysis, while fantastic sets - often created from bits of cardboard, built in back yards and garages (literally), or relying on deft trick photography - serve as the framework for action scenes. It all looks very fake as a depiction of reality, but convincingly as a depiction of 1920s movie sets and environments. Even a very lovecraftian conceit - that the Old Ones are fond of avant-garde art - is worked into the segments in R'Lyeh and dreams. A DVD extra shows us how it was all made, and it is hard not to be impressed by the dedication the crew have shown for an expensive hobby project.

 

There is a lavish attention to period detail, even if reality sometimes peeks through. Occasionally, the characters look less like actors and more like the kind of hipsters who are into shooting Cthulhu movies (Inspector Legrasse's moustache is not just fake, it is fake even as a fake moustache). The one trick that sticks out like a sore thumb within the fiction of the 1920s movie is specifically where greenscreened actors are projected on the sets digitally - the computer work is obvious and pixellated.

 

Nonetheless, Call of Cthulhu is a success. It is a loving homage to Lovecraft, monster movies, and an earlier period of filmmaking. It is moody, and in the most successful scenes (the swamp, dreams and the masterful finale on board the Alert and among the ruins of R'Lyeh), manages to be creepy and unsettling. Cthulhu is still as fundamentally goofy as ever (presented here as an animatronic model, and represented by multiple specially crafted "idols"), but we don't mind.

 

Call of Cthulhu can be ordered from http://www.cthulhulives.org/. A sequel, based on The Whisperer in Darkness, is also for sale (announced as "A New ALL-TALKING Feature" no less!). I have ordered a copy and will post an update once I have watched it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RPGista]

Very good posts. Sorry if I dont have time right now, but perhaps you have heard of Following, from Christopher Nolan? It was I think his first "major" film, about a writter that decides to follow people in order to observe their lives (in a kind of clandestine way), untill he actually meets a thief that goes around breaking into houses, but not just for stealing... Its an interesting film, a good photography and a bit of his trademarked "formally unusual screenplay".

 

 

 

[Melan]

The Amazing Screw-on Head: only

of this cartoon has been produced, but it is worth a watch. A not entirely serious steampunk story based on Mike Mignola's art, some of its scenes and the general tone of its architectural world would be inspiring for Thief-related games.

 

 

 

[grayman]

I watched The Call of Cthulhu a couple weeks ago after reading about it here. Fascinating movie. I grew up on Lovecraft and other writers who wrote in that vein.

 

I've added the Screw-On Head to my Netflix queue.

 

Great thread, thanks.

[Melan]

Maybe not completely obvious, but

, an amateur Batman movie serial cobbled together from 1920s silent movie bits and animated to a really unsettling score, is something I could see inspiring a mission, maybe even a series of them. All quite clever.

[demagogue]

BTW, if we're going to post very old vampire movies that have a connection to our avatars, a la Melan, for the surrealists & Andre Breton, while An Andalusian Dog was the classic Surrealist movie of course (but that came much later, 1929), the original movie that (reportedly) inspired them and became their favorite of the era was Nosferatu (1922). Shadows & silhouettes played an iconic role in that movie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lol at his expression, though.

 

Call of Cthulhu is generally considered unfilmable as a story based on three completely different plot lines, and the piecing together of information to arrive at horrific conclusions.

 

Another recent novel like this would be House of Leaves. I can't imagine how they could adapt it to film since it's so layered. That doesn't stop kids from making mock trailers all the time for it for school projects.

[Melan]

Ministry of Fear by Fritz Lang

 

If there ever was a man in movie history to make spy movies, Fritz Lang was that man. He was among the first to lay down the tropes of the genre in Dr. Mabuse and later Spione (which still echoes in James Bond and modern technotrillers), and he could also give it his own paranoid spin, pitting his heroes against all-powerful conspiracies and systems of oppression. Lang's movies are full of people being followed, ransacked offices, webs of deception and characters assuming false appearances and personas. Ministry of Fear is one of the best of those movies.

 

Set in wartime London, the movie stars Stephen Neale, a man released from an insane asylum, who accidentally finds himself in the middle of a Nazi espionage plot. An innocent fairground prize becomes a deadly lure; people get killed in disquieting ways and shadowy characters begin stalking our hero, who falls for a pretty Austrian refugee while on the run.

 

The action takes place in a claustrophobic world alternating between shadowy staircases, streets under blackout and dilapidated apartments, intercut with scenes in bright salons and perfectly wholesome offices, which contain a different, more subtle form of menace. It is to the credit of Ray Milland, the actor playing Neale, that he is perfect as the man being followed: he is full of nervous tension as he moves from shadow to shadow, always only a step ahead of his pursuers; it is his eyes, looking out for unseen enemies, that tell us he is being hunted. Marjorie Reynolds is good enough as the beautiful Carla, but credit must especially go to the unctuous Dan Duryea and the menacing Percy Waram, who play some of the movie's opponents with a threatening air.

 

There is very little in Ministry of Fear someone with a knowledge of the spy genre, thrillers and film noir wouldn't find familiar. It is a formulaic film - but we must not forget that it was made by one of the people who created that formula. It brings an excellent combination of set design (obviously not the real London, but acceptable as its Nazi-haunted counterpart), performance and camera work. The action is tense and packed, and every few minutes, there is some piece of iconic imagery I couldn't help but marvel at. Also, while it may not be chock full of them, this movie gets "Nazis" perfectly as villains: they are out there in the shadows, they move in them with a careless, elegant ease, and they are out to get you. Ministry of Fear is not the best or most important Lang movie, and it is reputedly marred by studio interference. Nevertheless, it is still one of the greats - perhaps not a classic, but close enough, and a perfect introduction to Lang's mid-career work.

 

And, well, the shadowplay makes for great thiefy imagery, which is why it is getting posted in this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[skacky]

Great recommendations Melan, I'm surprised to find The Amazing Screw-On Head in that list, I watched it some years ago and then completely forgot about it.

Also, I've seen Fantômas but I never watched Les Vampires. Guess I'll have to watch it now.

[Melan]

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (a.k.a. SATAN SATAN SATAN SATAN!) by Benjamin Christensen. This is an odd beast of a movie, and rather hard to classify. It treats its subject matter; witches, devils and witch trials in the Middle Ages in a way that’s part documentary, part dramatisation and part exploitation. The framing is documentaristic, discussing old world views, beliefs in magical practices, and the methods of the Inquisition. However, the extended live action sequences – mostly short, but one forming a longer story arc within the movie – entirely abandon this neutral pretence, and revel in the grotesque and often disturbing imagery of black magic, physical deformity and torture. In portraying mediaeval prejudices, the film’s approach is entirely exploitative, transforming its sources into lurid entertainment. This is Häxan’s great draw today – as a freakshow or pseudo-horror, it is a precursor to the exaggerated “Satanism” of black metal. Was it a coincidence that this movie was conceived in Denmark and produced in Sweden?

 

We are shown a little carnival of bloody horrors. Old crones brew foul concoctions in their cellar lairs, or fly to satanic witches’ sabbaths in the woods. Young women cavort with grotesque devils. Superstitious townsfolk denounce their own as witches and sorcerers. The monks who run the witch trials (who could be the villains of the film) are conniving, rotten scumbags, played by the actors with relish, and the rest of the “mediaeval” figures – superstitious, ugly and weirdly dressed folks – are also simple caricatures instead of realised personalities. In fact, Häxan is less horroristic than hilariously, although sometimes disturbingly funny. Its devils with their wagging tongues and grimacing faces are lovingly-made rubber-and-fur monsters (one of them, churning butter, looks disturbingly like it is beating off), and as we look on the actors, we sometimes have the feeling they are having the time of their lives. There is a full array of clever trick shots, reversed footage, superimposition and other neat touches which are very impressive tricks by the standards of their time. They may be old news today, but they work admirably, and the dark lighting gives the live scenes a very appropriate ambience. Here is a vision of The Darkest Middle Ages, not really accurate, but a very entertaining and popular fantasy, its images still very powerful ninety years after the film’s debut. The ending, serving an ironic counterpoint, raises questions which are less and less comfortable the more we consider them – can we safely write off ancient superstition as something we have surpassed? The timeframe is 1922, but it may as well be 2012.

 

Well, and also, if you want your thievish imagery for a Pagan- or Inquistion-inspired mission, this is the place to look.

 

On this DVD, Häxan comes in two versions. The first is the 2001 restoration, a very sharp, tinted copy featuring three scores (one symphonic, two more experimental), which looks and sounds as well as a film from 1922 can. However, the disc also contains the previously better known black-and-white version, which is a good 30 minutes shorter, rather less well-preserved, but it features narration by cult author William S. Burroughs, which is nice as added value. You can also find the first version for free on Youtube, but I really think the great resolution of the DVD is worth it.

 

 

 

 

[Melan]

Judex (1963) by Georges Franju: visual poetry and chase scenes ant 30 km per hour

 

Although made in the time of the New Wave, Judex belongs to a more ancient French film tradition that goes right back to some of the ur-works of cinema: the adventure serial, developed in America but perfected by a Frenchman, Louis Feuillade. Feuillade, an arch-conservative who directed over 600 films over a period of some two decades, married the idea of film continuity to fast-paced crime stories which, although filmed in a straightforward and natural style, were delightfully surreal. Their central characters were master criminals prowling the French underworld, always ahead of the authorities and ready to come up with improbable schemes, or switch disguises and disappear among unsuspecting citizens. These films are chaotic, unpredictable (even the length of individual episodes is not fixed), and still a whole lot of fun – their admirers ranged from Fritz Lang to the Surrealists to Renoir, Cocteau and the critics and filmmakers of the New Wave.

 

People may know Feuillade best from Fantômas and Les Vampires, his most famous work; Judex, released in 1916, is relatively less recognised, and at the time of writing, only available on a Region 1 DVD. In contrast to the amoral criminals of earlier serials, the central character here is Judex, a dark-caped hero who commands a company of masked men from an underground lair filled with secret doors and high-tech gadgets in a way that presages The Shadow and Batman. When his arch-nemesis, the evil banker Favraux throws a party to celebrate the wedding of his daughter, Jacqueline, Judex threatens him with death unless he repents: and, as predicted, when the clock strikes midnight, Favraux falls dead on the floor. This is only the beginning of the story, as the banker’s wealth attracts the attentions of Marie Verdier, the governess of Jacqueline’s daughter, who decides to do away with her and discover the mystery of Favraux’s looted grave on her own. In its original form, Judex was a meandering story of 12 episodes totalling more than five hours, and has been remade twice: a sound version was released in 1935, and in 1963, it came into the hands of Georges Franju, who produced the present one-and-a-half-hour version.

 

Franju’s Judex is not simply a shortened recreation of the original. Feuillade’s serials are forward-looking trillers anticipating a future full of new anxieties: bicycle and car chases bringing with them breakneck speed, the dangers of modern technology and communication, and perpetual uncertainty in an increasingly anonymous world: their spiritual successors in this sense aren’t found here, but perhaps in the works of Jacques Rivette. Franju’s film is instead a nostalgic look back to the Belle Époque when car chases still proceeded at a pace of 30 km per hour, machinery was noisy and unreliable, phones were not yet omnipresent, and the threats one faced were on the human level – if they were crimes, they were at least understandable and personal, far from the horrors of the coming war.

 

The dynamic menace of Feuillade is contrasted here with poetic images and graceful, slow-paced action. Judex does not actually do much that would count as superheroic (he has a retro-futuristic surveillance camera in his underground lair, wears a dramatic black cape with a broad-brimmed hat, can climb walls and pick locks, and he is a knowledgeable illusionist who can conjure doves on a whim), and he fails as frequently as his enemies. This is a human-level conflict where cars break down or run out of petrol, people must fetch help from the nearby village to batter down a door, cunning plans simply don’t work and a thug infiltrating an apartment may just slip from a fourth floor balcony and fall to his death. The plot is as much about failure as about success, and if Marie Verdier and her followers are no more competent than Judex’s men or the friendly and incompetent Detective Cocontin, it only adds to the film’s atmosphere. Judex does not concern itself too much with realism: it dwells on the edge of dreamlike improbability, and a cliffhanger situation at the end is more or less resolved with a playful and charmingly obvious example of deus ex machina. It is a slightly melancholic image of another time, which of course never really existed except in our imagination.

 

Franju not so much re-films Feuillade as he inverts him: but even doing so, he retains some of the surreal essence; the fascination with disguises and pursuit, the fluid and wonderfully choreographed action which keeps the plot in perpetual motion, and most essentially (to recall the delirious Les Vampires) the villainous Marie Verdier gracefully slinking around in the equivalent of Irma Vep’s tight-fitting catsuit, a working class outfit, a nun’s habit, or really anything. She is beautiful, she is evil, she is the star of the show and she knows it. Some of the most beautiful black-and-white photography is committed here on celluloid; I do not know any other movie where the blacks are as black and the shadows are as inky as they are here. Appropriately enough, there is a lot of perfectly lit nocturnal action with the obligatory rooftop scene, and it all looks as good as a movie on this subject realistically can.

 

Franju’s film is an interesting artifact that seems to lie outside its time. It takes an entirely opposite track to Feuillade’s works than the Louis de Funes action comedies about Fantômas which – although well made – have precious little to do with their source material. There are ideas in them that can only be recaptured in certain ways, and as Feuillade’s colour adaptations (including Franju’s own Nuits Rouges, a much weaker effort from 1973) show, their element is black and white, and they no longer work in modern idioms. Judex works because it is sufficiently fascinated with early cinema to step out of the present; yet it is as much a reflection on modern nostalgia for the silent film era as a falling in love again with the original works. It captures something about why we still find them so much fun with all their technical inferiority and wear-and-tear. It is a farewell to an age, one that was long gone even in 1963, and which is now even more distant.

 

 

 

 

[Tels]

man, you should put these images in a spoiler tag.. my browser choked on the thread,then hid himself in a corner and cried all afternoon..

[demagogue]

Yes, waiting for all the pictures to come in, and not being able to read in the meantime (because the text keeps jumping *every* time a new picture comes in), is getting a little crazy. Having them in spoiler tags would be good.

 

Here's an interesting Polish movie I randomly found this last week, The Saragossa Manuscript. You can turn on the CC captions & get English subtitles. It's got stories nested inside of stories, with the nested stories interacting with each other... So they have time bending stuff in a Napoleonic Era setting. It's based on a novel written in 1847, and it starts with a grandson reading about his grandfather in the Napoleonic wars. I think there's some inspiration to be had for our brand of storytelling. Let me see if I can write up a little review of it like Melan's. But I need to watch it again to figure out what's going on!

 

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLpPjSQptco

 

 

 

Edit: Taking my own advice.

[Melan]

Thanks for the notice! You are both right; I have gone back and spoilered all the reviews that had multiple large images.