Thread: Straight Razors in Movies

John Carter, towards the beginning,

im sure someone has mentioned it but in schindlers list-oskar schindler and amon goeth are simultaneously shaving with a straight....and also in the movie the public enemy starring james cagney-early in the movie a young tom powers gets whipped by his father using a leather straight razor strop hanging in the kitchen....

In the 1940 movie City For Conquest, there is a scene where James Cagney is shaving himself with a straight while talking to Ann Sheridan. His techniques are good, but I had to cringe when he's shaving his neck and Ann tickles him in the ribs. He turns to her and says "whattaya tryin to do, make me cut my throat?" He looked like he knew what he was doing, and I was amused that he was using the same sequence of passes that I do. She also teases him about getting soap in his ear, which happens to me often...

In Seven Samurai, there are a couple times where they show their period appropriate razors with no scales. First when Kambei is shaving his head (or rather having his head shaved) to disguise himself as a Buddhist monk, then later when Manzo forces his daughter Shino to have her hair cut short with one so she can pass for a boy.

The bad guy in The Patriot is shaving with a straight when his guys get attacked after burning the church with all of those people in it.

The bad guy in the first Hell Boy gets his head shaved but a Nazi chick (who is smoking a cigarette) in an abandoned subway locker room.

But the movies that made me interested in shaving is the Eastwood westerns.

I almost forgot the other aspect of this conversation about what inspired me to straight shave. It actually wasn't from movies, I got inspired after reading Alas Babylon a dozen years ago.

I don't imagine many on here are fans of the tv show, Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but a couple weeks ago the character Frank (Danny DeVito), brandishes a (fake) straight razor in a couple of scenes. You never see him use it, but it's implied that he uses it- by the end of the episode hes shaved himself completely from head to toe and slathered himself in hand sanitizer to make himself "pure". HA!



I wasn't inspired to start straight shaving from any movies or tv show. ...But now that people know I do it, whenever a razor appears on the screen everybody I'm with turns to look at me.

I haven't seen this new season, but I have 1 through 6 on dvd. One of the funniest shows in television history if you ask me.