Stamps In The Movies!

The episode of the old GB TV series "The Saint" called "The Scales of Justice" has a philatelic angle to the plot.

I recently watched an interesting film that came out in 2022, a British film called "Operation Mincemeat". It takes place in 1943 when things looked pretty dark for the British people in World War II. It's about a ruse devised by British military intelligence in which they "plant" a corpse (a recently deceased man) in the sea off the coast of Spain and load him down with all sorts of letters and documents making it seem as though the British are about to deploy their troops to Greece rather than to Sicily (where they were really planning their deployment). At one point in the film, one of the civilians working on the project, a woman played by British actress Penelope Wilton (she was also one of the main characters in Downton Abbey), receives a letter from the wife of one of the naval officers involved, who has taken herself and their children to the United States to ride out the war. We see the envelope and it's franked with a copy of the 6 cent US airmail stamp, Scott C25, which is period correct

There have been other films based on that story as well. One of the originators of that plot was Ian Fleming, who later became famous for inventing a character called James Bond.

2019 American Drama (Ethan Hawke), "Adopt a Highway" has a quite valuable worldwide collection, a topical collecting theme and in it is pictured a 1910 Edward VII 2d Tyrian plum.

The only 2 instances I can think of in entertainment where stamps are mentioned are first, the original Out of Towners movie from 1970, starring Jack Lemmon. He and his wife, played by Sandy Dennis, are running all over Manhattan one night trying to find a hotel room or some shelter, at least. For a brief moment, they are standing in front of a shop with a sign that says "Stamps." It was street level and would have been in mid-town.

Though not a movie, the second instance I can think of is in the Odd Couple tv show. Felix and Oscar decide to become "big brothers" to a fatherless kid, and when spending a day with the kid Felix shows him some of his US stamps. At one point, Felix realizes the Zion Canyon stamp is missing from his album, so he yells out to Oscar, " Oscar, what happened to Zion Canyon?" After thinking a moment, Oscar yells back, "Umm... he couldn't hit a curve ball so they sent him to the minors."

Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes and Roy Billing star in this episode of 'Two Twisted' from Youtube, produced by Bryan Brown:

Von Stauffenberg's Stamp

Highway to Heaven had an episode with Ernest Borgnine looking at a big blue collection in a pawn shop.

I don't know episode or year. I just remember seeing Mr. Borgnine (who was a collector himself) looking at the collection and saying he would pay ....$ for collection because just one stamp was worth it.

I recently finished watching an interesting TV series. It's Swedish, and is currently streaming on Acorn TV. The English title is The Restaurant and it follows the intertwining stories of a wealthy Stockholm family, the Lowanders, who run an upscale restaurant, and the staff who work in the kitchen and dining room, sort of a Swedish Upstairs Downstairs, or Downton Abbey, but not as aristocratic as those two British shows. In the 4th series, which goes out of sequence chronologically because it reverts back a couple of decades from the 3rd series to the year 1951, there is a scene in which Helga Lowander, matriarch of the family and Stig Backe, head chef of the restaurant sit down on a bench by the shore at the end of an evening of Midsummer festivities. Stig pulls out a bundle of letters from his pocket, letters that Helga had written to him years before, and , presumably love letters while they were carrying on an extramarital affair. In a closeup we can see that they are franked with common Swedish definitives from the early 1920's, showing the heraldic lion,Scott 118, King Gustav, Scott 139 , and even a semi-postal stamp, I think it's Scott B8.

I've just seen a film that was very recently released, December 2024, in fact that doesn't really show stamps all that much, but is literally about the mail. The film, currently streaming on Netflix, is called The Six Triple Eight, and tells the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the Women's Army Corps. This was a division composed entirely of African American women and was the only unit of women of color to be deployed to Europe during World War II. The film tells the story of how this group of about 850 women was given the monumental task of sorting through a huge backlog of 17 million letters to and from GI's that were sitting, undelivered, and in many cases, undeliverable in a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland. They were given 6 months (by a very dubious Army administration) to accomplish the task, and despite hardship and brutal bigotry constantly hurled at them, completed the task in half the time. Mostly we see thousands upon thousands of mail sacks in never ending piles, but occasionally we see individual letters, mostly showing the common US airmails of the time (early 1945). It's a very interesting and well made movie with some outstanding acting, most notable by Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams, and some interesting small roles, including Susan Sarandon as Eleanor Roosevelt and Sam Waterston as FDR (but looking more like Harry Truman than FDR!)