Donald Trump has been telling his “sir” stories for a long time. Back in 2020 someone counted 173 of them, and that was before he lost to Joe Biden. They’ve proliferated since. Most times the purported speaker is an unidentified archetype of big, brawny masculinity – a soldier, a construction worker. But those aren’t the only ones moved to address him as “sir.”
After the NATO meeting the other day, when he was finished trashing the organization and the leaders of several individual countries, he told reporters what they said to him in private. “They like the job I’m doing. They said, ‘Sir, we love you!’ These are grown people saying that. Isn’t that nice?”
Yeah, sure they did. It seems that when he wakes up from his frequent daytime slumbers, he keeps right on dreaming.
“To Sir, With Love” was a 1967 film that was no more believable than Trump’s confabulations. Sidney Poitier played an immigrant engineer who can’t find a job in London, so he takes a temporary position as a teacher at a school for wayward youth. The film was rather preachy – the word “sententious” crops up in several contemporaneous reviews. (Sample: “The sententious script sounds as if it has been written by a zealous Sunday school teacher after a particularly exhilarating boycott of South African oranges.”) Nobody ever went broke underestimating the public appetite for what one critic dubbed “sentimental non-realism,” though. Made for $600,000, the movie brought in $44 million at the box office.
One selling point for British audiences was the screen debut of 18-year-old pop singer Lulu, who was just 15 when she reached the UK charts in 1964 with a cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” She also sang the theme song, which became a bigger hit than the movie, at least in America, where it held the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 for five weeks and was the No. 1 single of the year. The film’s producers were publicly miffed that the song was snubbed by Oscar, a fair point considering one of the nominees was an undistinguished jazz-inflected instrumental by Quincy Jones. (“Talk to the Animals,” from “Doctor Doolittle,” won.)
Oddly, the song was relatively neglected in Britain, where is was released only as a B-side.
