When I read the preamble to One-Taker by Harpy in Magpie 76 (‘famous film scene’, ‘15-letter film title’, etc) I immediately thought of the Union Station shootout scene from The Untouchables. This was probably partly because it’s one of the few films I actually own and partly because of the classic Commodore 64 version from some years ago. Although it turned out that I was barking up the wrong tree I couldn’t help wondering if the idea might be worth pursuing.

Some months later I decided it was, so I watched the scene in question a few times and made sure I fully understood the plot and characters involved. I also read up on the film itself and discovered the link with Battleship Potemkin, of which I was previously unaware. Obviously the grid would have to have a staircase represented in some manner, and my first idea was that both films should be involved with the solver having to make the correct choice after resolving some ambiguity. Eventually I decided this wouldn’t work, partly because it was too complicated but also because I wanted to mirror as closely as possible the preamble to One-Taker which required a ‘15-letter film title’, though I still wanted to reference Battleship Potemkin in some way.

A bit of doodling on a blank grid gave me the 3-D idea for the staircase which would require some drawing instructions. ‘EN’ was demanded by One-Taker’s preamble (‘with the star of the film represented by two clashing letters’), and double-letter cells also seemed a useful entry method for the baby and pram (conveniently the same length); using single squares for each letter would make the pram too big. This would need to fall down the steps, so clashes in the original positions and double letters in the final positions might work.

Around this point I started to consider the other three main characters from the scene (George Stone, Bowtie and the bookkeeper) and noticed the coincidence of ‘one’ and ‘two’ appearing in ‘Stone’ and ‘Bowtie’ (albeit backwards in the latter). Given the title (which was currently ‘Two-taker’), this was too good not to use, so ‘Stone’ and ‘Bowtie’ would appear as full names (given by overlong answers and multiple clashes), allowing the critical dialogue (“One…”, “Two!”) to be represented. The bookkeeper would have to be ‘WP’ (Walter Payne).

At some stage I remembered that at least one foreign (Indian?) word in Chambers was defined as ‘untouchables’, and a search yielded Burakumin, Dalit and Harijan (all in Chambers and Bradford’s). Although my original idea was to embed one of these in the grid somehow, I noticed that ‘Burakumin’ and ‘Battleship Potemkin’ shared quite a few letters, and that those in the second but not the first, TTLESHPPOTEI, were surprisingly close to ‘Eliot Ness’. After a lot of letter-juggling, I included ‘Eisenstein’ and ‘Russian’ to produce the long anagram to ‘Eliot Ness’, ‘he hunts Al Capone’, ‘Nitti’, ‘Burakumin’, ‘best spies’; this last phrase was perhaps a little forced but it was the best I could do. I decided that the letters involved would map to the clues in some fashion, although 47 was a slightly awkward number. I’d also noticed that ‘Eliot Ness’ anagrammed to ‘Stone lies’, which he does at the foot of the staircase, and again that was too fortunate to ignore.

Now for the grid, at which point I realised how hard it would be to have ‘The Untouchables’ portrayed symmetrically. I considered a big grid with 15 columns (maybe 15×12) and ‘The Untouchables’ on the top row, but this might have been a bit excessive, so I decided that dropping the ‘The’ might be preferable and aimed for a more standard 12×12, although I knew that with 47 clues the average answer length would be shorter than is ideal. Having noted that ‘Untouchables’ and ‘Union Station’ both began with ‘U’ and were twelve letters I decided to try those in the first row and column, although I never thought that would be feasible; it would also make symmetry extremely difficult to achieve.

To my surprise, my first few efforts at putting something in the grid weren’t as hopeless as I’d expected, so I persevered. After many hours’ effort I finally came up with something I was fairly happy with. The grid was symmetrical apart from the two missing bars in the first row and column, and though the average answer length was, as expected, quite low (though still over 5) I felt the amount of checking made up for this to some extent.

Next came the question of how to include the messages. Using misprints was my first intention, with the correct letters yielding one message (‘Eliot Ness’, etc) and the incorrect letters the other (the drawing instructions for the staircase). After some thought it occurred to me that I could change the title to ‘Take Two’, a more natural phrase anyway, and use that thematically in the clueing method, in a similar manner to a recent Listener (#4038, Playtime by Samuel). Later, I realised that by incorporating further instances of ‘take two’ into the preamble I could account for the slight asymmetry by including rogue bars in the first row and column, making the presented grid perfectly symmetrical (which made me feel much better), and for the removal of ‘one’ and ‘two’ from the names ‘Stone’ and ‘Bowtie’. Further consideration led me to the jigsaw entry method, since this would make the entry of the film title on the top row less transparent.

As the preamble was an integral part of the puzzle, I wrote it as I went along - in fact, the majority was written before I had even made a start on a grid - and I managed to include several phrases from One-Taker in my original preamble:

“The filled grid depicts a famous film scene ([...] shot in a single take), with the star of the film represented by two clashing letters”

“The 15-letter film title [less any leading article] is symmetrically located in the upper part of the grid, and must be highlighted”

“…must then be ‘moved’ to its resting position, obscuring other cells as a result and leaving empty cells behind”

“In the resulting grid, [...] to complete the picture”

“Numbers in brackets are answer lengths”

Some more re-jigging of the grid followed, the last when I decided that ‘tap issues’ was an unacceptable plural, and finally it was time to write the clues. This part always takes me an age, but I hadn’t appreciated just how difficult it would be to write clues which would need two letters removing and real words always resulting. The awkward consonant pairs (e.g. MK) were probably the hardest.

Some of the ideas I didn’t use included:

using “21 letters must be shaded” from One-Taker’s preamble as part of a hint to shade the squares under the staircase (which would have numbered exactly 21 with the removal of one step);

referring to an earlier scene in the film in which another of Capone’s bookkeepers is shot dead and the word ‘touchable’ written on the wall in blood (so the solver would have had to write these letters in red);

making reference to the time of the shootout (midday, since the gangsters planned to catch the 12:05 to Miami - another chance to use ‘one two’?);

leaving ‘WP’ (for ‘Walter Payne’) in the grid, through use of words like cow-pilot/co-pilot, pawpaw/papaw/pawaw, tawpie/tawie etc;

incorporating an anagram of ‘Walter Payne / bookkeeper’ into the preamble as further confirmation, but I decided the preamble was more than long enough already (my original draft had required the solver to write BOOKKEEPER, described as ‘an English word with a unique property’, i.e. three consecutive double letters, below the grid, but the editors felt this was disjointed and unnecessary and on reflection I agreed);

writing themed clues, as per One-Taker, but my film knowledge wasn’t up to this, and anyway the double-letter removal clue type was hard enough;

using exactly the same preamble as One-Taker, but this would have been too contrived;

putting NESSES in place of NOSEYS in the bottom left and requiring ‘Ness’ to be highlighted, but though this was possible I felt it was inelegant since ‘EN’, representing Eliot Ness, already appeared in the grid;

making the grid a pangram, but though again this might have been possible I felt it would make too many answers obscure;

making the grid ‘carte blanche’, but there was no real justification for this and it would have spoilt the need to ‘take two’ bars from the grid, unless bars were required in the solution which would have been messy with the staircase to draw as well;

having the second arrangement of the first set of ‘taken’ letters (giving ‘Untouchables’, etc) fixed by alphabetical order of clues (or similar) rather than simply being numbered, but this just seemed to require extra donkey work from the solver (not to mention the extra restrictions that would have been imposed on the clues).

After a ‘stewing’ period I had the puzzle test-solved, topped and tailed it and then sent it off. Shane responded in very generous terms; he and Mark had changed a few things, notably the preamble in which they felt that the nod to ‘One-Taker’ was clear enough so had adjusted several of the ‘borrowed’ phrases for clarity (e.g. ‘star’ became ‘leading character’ to distinguish between Eliot Ness and Kevin Costner). They also removed the requirement to highlight the title and location, which I had only included because this was done in ‘One-Taker’, as well as the need to write ‘bookkeeper’ under the grid as explained above. After a few final clue adjustments and tweaks the puzzle was ready for publication.

I am very grateful to my test-solver and the Magpie editors for their extremely helpful suggestions and improvements, and also owe many thanks to Harpy (collectively, Charybdis and Ploy) for unwittingly giving me the idea in the first place and for generously agreeing to the publication of this sequel (and for their comments prior to my submitting the puzzle). Thanks also (in advance) to all who have submitted feedback via the Magpie website. Finally, when I set the puzzle the film scene was readily available on YouTube; unfortunately this is no longer the case. It can however be viewed in full at the harder-to-find location of http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/29769380, but apologies to anyone who was stymied through being unable to locate this.

Elint (Jun ’10)

Posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 2:43 pm under Setting the scene.
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