Looks like Ian and Jonathan have it this week. Thanks to Adelephant for the fiendish question. Click continue if you give up.
Earlier Adelephant posed the 19th RB Quiz question, namely:
What links “Wood Painting – The Movie!” to: Clint Eastwood; a Temptations album track that turned out to be good for someone else; plus the bearer of ‘Claws of the Scorpion’ and the Norman invasion (with opposing knights)?
…And the answer is… The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!
‘Wood Painting’ was the rather uninteresting name of a play written by Ingmar Bergman in 1953 for some Malmo drama students. He adapted it for film in 1957, in the process changing the title to The Seventh Seal.
In the Book of Revelation, God has in his right hand a scroll which has seven seals. Jesus Christ opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons forth the four horsemen, harbingers of the Last Judgment…. Death (pale horse), War (red horse), Famine (black horse) and Conquest (white horse) – which gives the other answers.
The Seventh Seal famously features Death as a character. In the Bible, Death rides on a pale horse – providing the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s 1985 movie Pale Rider.
War (What is it Good For?) was originally written in 1969 for The Temptations by Motown’s Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, but they worried that releasing an obvious anti-Vietnam track as a single might offend the group’s more conservative fans. Consequently they re-recorded it with Edwin Starr and it became his biggest hit – a Billboard number 1 in 1970.
‘Claws of the Scorpion’ is an alternative name for the constellation Libra, or the scales. In the Book of Revelation, the horseman Famine carries a set of scales. Meanwhile, the Norman invasion is generally known as the Norman Conquest.
‘Opposing knights’ is simply a cryptic clue for black and white horses – the mounts of Famine and Conquest respectively.
Blooming Nora! That was a tricky one!