"Game of Fate"

The guest house where we are staying has a bar attached to it, which is open a few nights of the week. Sometimes, rather curiously, the bar is open, but the front door is locked, restricting the potential clientele to those already in the building.

It has an emphasis on games, with a pool table, darts machine, a couple of bowling lanes and a curious game that looks like a cross between air hockey, rebound and shove ha'penny which we must tackle at some point.

The strangest feature though is the prints on the wall. There are three pictures depicting legendary deceased film stars and musicioans having fun in a bar a million miles removed from Niederalm. Rather like Dick Turpin in the haunted pubs of London, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe seem extraordinarily busy in the after-life, as they feature in all of them.

The thing is, apart from finding the concept bizarre, the execution of the paintings is really lousy. This is despite them being by different artists, George Bungarda and Chris Consani.

Consani's picture is called "Game of Fate". Searching around the internet it looks like there are a couple of variations of this print available, but the one in the bar here features the three figures lurking in the background, but not the bright pink lights to the left of the picture as illustrated here.

I think the three lurkers are meant to be Marx brothers, but my first impression was that it was the somewhat random selection of Art Garfunkel, the DUP's Ian Paisley (once leader of the "Save Ulster from Sodomy" campaign), and Doctor Who Patrick Troughton (sporting a wedge haircut rather than his usual bowl effort). Two of whom aren't even dead yet.

Comments

[Dave Cross]

Hard to be sure at that size, but I think that's the Three Stooges, not the Marx Brothers.

[Martin Belam]

Clearly I don't know my badly painted old time comedy troupes well enough then :-)

Definitely the 3 Stooges

[Will Sheehan]

I know for certain that it is the Three Stooges as I also have that print hanging on one of my walls. There are also a lot of things pertaining to the Stooges that any Stooge fan would recognize written in various parts of the picture. It seems a shame that Consani is now selling the print without the Stooges so I think the original will become a collector's item.