Philately Spotlight – Television, Movies, etc.

How about The Mandarin Mystery on YouTube from 1936.

Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn isn’t about collecting, but the stamps play a big role in the story.

There is a book series about a stamp collecting hired killer by Lawrence Block.

Also there is film being made...

philatelia mentioned the 1963 movie Charade starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. This is a great movie even without the rare stamps plot twist. It’s kind of ironic that Audrey Hepburn starred in a movie about rare stamps as she would later become the subject of a modern day rarity.

In 2001, Deutsche Post was planning on issuing a stamp featuring Hepburn, who was shown with a cigarette holder in her mouth. Her son objected to the depiction of his mother smoking and Deutsche Post scrapped the idea for the stamp and ordered all 14 million of them destroyed. Three sheets of 10 were, however, sent to the German Ministry of Finance and were used as postage. Five used copies were later found by unsuspecting collectors in kiloware lots and the first one was auctioned in 2005 for €58,000. The second sold for €135,000 and the third for €53,000. Number four went for €60,000 and number five for €53,000.

Hepburn’s son, Sean Ferrer, was in possession of a mint sheet of 10 that Deutsche Post had sent him for his approval and decided to auction them in 2010 with all proceeds going to UNICEF, Hepburn’s favorite charity. Against estimates of €500,000, it went for €430,000.

One of the kiloware finds:



Ferrer’s sheet of 10:



More on these stamps can be found here.

(Photo from Auktionshaus Felzmann)

Lawrence Block’s Keller series of books are all about a hit man who is a stamp collector. I read two of them and they aren’t too bad.

In the past couple of years I've seen all kinds of retrospective reviews of Roth's book since it has come back into attention due to some of the resonances with the current Trump administration.  Often this book is paired in discussion with Sinclair Lewis' 1935 book "It Can't Happen Here", which I read a long time ago (25 or 30 years ago, anyway).  That book is another one with a main plot device of "America's descent into totalitarianism", although it was a forward-looking book in time span, a speculative future, rather than a look back at an alternative history as in the case of Roth's book.  No stamp collecting in the Lewis book, though, at least not as far as I can remember ....

Neither Roth's book nor Lewis' book were seen as the highlights of their authors' careers - Lewis won the Nobel Prize, Roth won virtually everything except the Nobel Prize, and both books are today seen as somewhat lesser achievements.  But the Lewis book does lead at least to this hilarious side note, taken from its Wikipedia article and referring to a planned 1980s television adaptation of the book - "... NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too cerebral for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials ...".

Ryan

The film Freaks and errors is currently available to watch free with commercials on Amazon prime video. I rather enjoyed it, especially the interview with the fella who flyspecks the Hong Kong China overprint series. And Cheryl Ganz is a jewel!

Several people have mentioned the Lawrence Block series featuring a hitman known as Keller. I do not think one is supposed to like hitman but you he comes across as a decent guy doing his job. Stamp collecting is a significant part of his life. I have read the 4 early ones and quite enjoyed them. Here is the Wikipedia description of Keller: 


Keller

Four episodic novels (Hit Man (1998), Hit List (2000), Hit Parade (2006) and Hit Me (2013)) as well as one full-length novel (Hit and Run (2008)) chronicle the life of Keller, a lonely, wistful hitman who originally appeared as a semi-regular feature in Playboy magazine in the 1990s. Most of the novels are fix-ups of related short stories; Hit and Run is the only Keller novel conceived of and written as a single story. In 2016, a new novella was published, Keller's Fedora, in which Keller is persuaded to come out of retirement for one last job.



Keller's full name is John Paul Keller (a fact mentioned in Hit Man), although he is rarely called anything but Keller in the series. The stories are rarely action-oriented or focused on the details of his crimes, instead being character studies of Keller's personality and the people he meets (e.g., Keller's being hired to kill a major league baseball designated hitter but postponing the act and following the team to away games so the hitter can reach the career milestone of 400 home runs). Originally based in New York City, after a disastrous hit gone wrong he later relocates to New Orleans where he lives under the name "Nicholas Edwards" and marries, has a child and works in construction. Keller receives assignments via a contact named Dot, who is originally based in White Plains. His assignments usually take him to different cities, where he often envisions himself retiring from the business, daydreaming about settling there, before finishing off the assignment and returning, his fantasies forgotten as a passing dream. Keller's pastime is stamp collecting, to which he is nearly obsessively devoted. He collects non-U.S. issues, prior to 1940, with a particular interest in stamps from former colonies of the French Empire.



Hit and Run was nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger at the 2009 Crime Thriller Awards.[7]

The book Solomon's Seal by Hammond Innes. About an estate agent hired to sell a property and finds these mysterious stamps in an album and sets out to find the story behind them. His publisher, Collins, actually produced the stamps as publicity items, see my post here

I have been punishing myself on and off over the past 6 months trying to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am nearing the end and smiled when I stumbled upon Mr. Bloom pondering finding a windfall of a valuable stamp to pay the mortgage off for an estate he dreams of owning. The Hamburg 7 shilling mauve imperf appears to be a Scott 20a and the Great Britain 4 pence rose on bluish paper to be Scott 22. There is a 3rd stamp but it carried onto another page. 

From the movie "The Maltese Falcon". The stamped envelope is not real but a prop.

Very good question