Friday

[In a sophisticated exchange programme, this post has been written by today's guest editor, Alex.]

I notice, as I write this, that Stranded Cinema doesn't have titles for its posts. Or rather it does of course but they are simply the days of the week. It suggests to me that I might talk about titles in my guest article here. "What makes a good title for a film" might be the title of this post if it had one. Of course if this was on Gamboling I would probably go for, "What's in a name?", "Naming Conventions" or "Titleation".

What makes a good title? One word titles can be fantastic and are probably best, Gladiator, Manhattan and Scream don't hang about. And you also have a number of hangers-on which are really one word titles with "the" tacked on the front. So we have, The Godfather, The Unforgiven. But is the "the" necessary?

Often it isn't. Certainly it's better as Gladiator not The Gladiator. The same is true the other way round for The Godfather. Gladiator is faster than Godfather and the title tells you that. In fact an even better comparison is with Goodfellas. The book on which Goodfellas is based was called Wise Guys but the name was changed. Presumably to make it faster like everything else in that amazing film. Keeping on this gangster theme I think we can see a mistake in "The Sopranos" which should have just been "Sopranos". In fact that's the way it's entered into parlance.

There are some terrible one word titles, Next having been rubbished on these very pages. But you're usually on safer ground. The most common place to find bad titles is at the very long end of the spectrum. Things like, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? are frankly ridiculous.

But in the middle. That two to five or six word title. That's the hard part to fathom...

[Tune in tomorrow for the concluding section to this special feature.]