Springtime For Hitler / Live-Action Films: In-Universe Examples

In-Universe Examples for Live-Action Films regarding Springtime for Hitler:

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• Ali G Indahouse: The Deputy Prime Minister plans to use Ali G as part of this sort of scheme repeatedly in order to cause a crisis of confidence and allow him to become Prime Minister: first he plans for choosing Ali G as their candidate to lose them a safe seat in a by-election, then when that fails he plots for Ali's incompetence to bring down the Prime Minister directly.
• All The Queens Men has an English Colonel sending his bumbling secretary, a disgraced U.S. soldier, a socially inept language expert, and a transvestite on a mission to steal an Enigma machine in 1944. The plan is to have them dress up as women and infiltrate the factory where the machines are made and steal one; unfortunately, the mission ends up going south from the beginning when the city they're supposed to airdrop near is just a façade. Attempting to radio command for help doesn't give them any help and nearly gives away their position. But in the end they infiltrate the factory and steal enough parts to make an Enigma machine thanks to the secretary's skill with repairing typewriters. But when the secretary comments that Germany won't even notice that a machine is missing since they only stole the parts, they realize what's really going on — the Allies already have an Enigma machine (in fact, a Polish scientist had used Awesomeness by Analysis and a few captured keys to reverse-engineer it) and have cracked its codes, so stealing one wasn't their mission. Their real mission was to attempt to steal one in such an obvious and ridiculous way that the Germans would inevitably discover — thus lulling them into a false sense of security about their codes by making them think the Allies were still trying and failing to get their hands on a machine. The secretary tries to give himself up out of a sense of duty to the Allies so that they can complete the real mission, but the others rescue him. While doing so, they make sure to try, and fail, to keep the Enigma machine. Final analysis: they subvert the trope by providing enough of a hint that they were after an Enigma machine to allow the Axis to believe it, fulfilling the true purpose of the mission while at the same time finding a way to escape captivity.
• American Fiction centers around a black author who, fed up with the success of stereotypical black trauma porn in media, writes a novel that exaggerates these stereotypes to the nth degree. It winds up becoming a success and even adapted into a movie, while all his attempts to sabotage it - such as changing the title of the book to Fuck - only make it more popular.
• Invoked in Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie: at the beginning of the film, Mandi of Cockburn Incorporated discussed how the titular Nerd has made gamers foster Bile Fascination, buying and playing video games that are terrible and reviled. As such, she has developed a follow-up to the infamous Eee Tee, designed to suck even more than the original, thus causing copies to fly off the shelves thanks to the Nerd's influence.
• In Back to the Future, this happens with Marty's plan to get his future parents together. The idea is that Marty will hit on Lorraine, she will be repulsed, and then George will step in to "rescue" her. Well, it turns out Lorraine is actually receptive to Marty's advances, and since he knows that she's his future mother, he's the one who's repulsed.
• This is the basic plot of the Spike Lee film Bamboozled, which stars Damon Wayans as a writer for a television network seeking to get out of his contract. He wants to create an intelligent television program about African-Americans, but the network won't go for his ideas. So to get himself fired he creates a show using the most offensive African-American stereotypes possible... and it becomes a runaway hit to the point even black audiences are dressing up as the racist characters.
• The Big Lebowski has a ransom demanded of the title character after Straw Nihilists kidnap his wife. Instead of having the ransom money dropped off, the Big Lebowski sends a briefcase containing old phone books, hoping that the kidnappers would kill his wife, while giving him cover to embezzle funds from his charity. He also sends a bum known as "the Dude" to make the drop-off, knowing full well he'd screw it up. While the drop-off is, indeed, screwed up, nobody gets killed by the kidnappers because they never had Lebowski's wife to begin with.
• Another Mel Brooks movie, Blazing Saddles, finds Hedley Lamarr, a corrupt government official, trying to drive the settlers of an Old West town off their land so he can steal it. Forced to appoint a sheriff, he selects a random black man, expecting the racist townspeople to be so demoralized that they give up. He certainly didn't expect the sheriff to stop crime and win over the town...
• Blue Streak sees former jewel thief Miles Logan attempt to infiltrate the police station where he hid a valuable diamond during his original arrest by posing as a cop, but despite his attempts to get a desk assignment so that he can retrieve the diamond, his faked credentials and natural street smarts are so good that he ends up becoming the interim head of the department's burglary division.
• Brewster's Millions (1985): Brewster is set to inherit $300 million, but in order to receive the full amount, he must spend $30 million within 30 days and have absolutely nothing to show for it by the end. Naturally, many of his attempts to lose money go haywire: he puts money on long-shots, and ends up winning. He lets his inexperienced friend run his investments, and succeeds spectacularly. He runs for Mayor, on his own dime, declaring that he's totally unqualified and has no ideas for the office, and the voters admire him for being honest and different from the established and corrupt politicians.
• In the 1972 film The Candidate, Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) is a campaign consultant hired by the Democrats to find a challenger for a U.S. Senate seat occupied by a very popular Republican incumbent. They figure they'll never win, but it would look too bad to let the incumbent run unchallenged. Lucas approaches Bill McKay (Robert Redford), an idealistic liberal activist and lawyer (and the estranged son of a popular former governor), for the role — he'll just lose anyway, Lucas says, so he can use the spotlight to gain attention for his causes. McKay agrees — and they both get so caught up in the election game that they end up winning. The film ends with a horrified McKay turning to Lucas on election night, just as the cheering crowds surround them, and asking, "...what do we do NOW?"
• Cold Turkey: Norman Lear's satirical film involves a tobacco company that, as a PR stunt, offers $25 million to any town in America whose entire population can give up their product for thirty days, reasoning that no town will be able to take them up on the offer... except, of course, one does.
• In the Danny Kaye movie The Court Jester, Kaye's character Hawkins (who is pretending to be a jester named Giacomo... it's that kind of movie) is challenged to a duel by Sir Griswold, aptly described as "a side of beef". The only problem is that Giacomo is not a knight and forbidden from taking part in a knightly duel. So the King, who favors Griswold, enlists "Giacomo" in a set of tests to determine whether he's worthy of knighthood or not. Giacomo/Hawkins attempts to fail the tests, but thanks to the king's guards cheating for him outrageously (challenged to "shoot a hawk in full flight", he doesn't even get his bow drawn before the carcass falls to the ground), "Candidate passes!" is the result of every one.
• In Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Victor Karlosson realizes that Iceland can't afford to win the Eurovision Song Contest and be required to pay for an expensive event the next year. So, he manipulates events to make Fire Saga Iceland's Eurovision entry, thinking that the group's ineptitude will make them lose the competition. Unfortunately for Victor, Fire Saga ends up being so endearingly bad that the group gets voted into the finals.
• A long-forgotten B mystery movie, The Falcon In Hollywood. A murder occurs on a movie set and in the end the killer turns out to be the film's producer, who had oversold investment shares and under-reported the cost, and was deliberately trying to make it a flop by doing things like hiring a director who had never directed the film's genre before, casting a motley assortment of has-beens and unknowns, etc. The producer turned to sabotage and murder when the film being made was turning out to be surprisingly good.
• In G.I. Jane, a female senator establishes a program to admit women into the Navy SEAL program. We later learn that she expected her chosen recruit to fail, allowing her to use the prospect of shutting down the program as a political bargaining chip with the military. Instead, the recruit ends up sticking with the programs and meeting all the standards, leading the senator trying to sabotage her.
• The Jidaigeki film Harakiri has Motome, a desperate young ronin who needs money to provide for his family, approaching the local daimyo and ask his permission to commit Seppuku there so that he may have the honor of being buried on his land. He expects that the daimyo will refuse his request and instead give him a few coins to go away. Unfortunately, the daimyo calls his bluff and forces him to go through with the act. To make matters even worse, Motome is so destitute that he has already sold the metal blades of his swords, so he has to disembowel himself with a blade made of bamboo.
• Head of State: In 1984, wildly popular Ronald Reagan was up for re-election. Knowing they couldn't win, the Democratic Party nominated a woman as vice president, to curry favor with female voters for the future. Inspired by this, this film has the hopeless party's leader select a minor black politician (played by Chris Rock) as their candidate, to win points with minorities and set himself up for a win in four years. Rock's character nominates his older brother as vice president and obviously they win, subverting the Mighty Whiteys' best attempt to sabotage their campaign. And of course, Hilarious in Hindsight today.
• In Here Come the Girls, the producers of the titular play hire Stanley Snodgrass, the most absolutely atrocious (both as a performer and because he is accident-prone) actor who ever worked in Broadway, to be The Bait for a Serial Killer Abhorrent Admirer of the play's main actress (who has sworn to kill any actors that get near her). After Stanley agrees to be the bait only if he gets a run-of-the-play contract and the catastrophic rehearsals, they really, really hope the killer will get rid of Stanley. He doesn't.
• In Heroes Wanted, Minister Boyero wants the team to fail so that he can eliminate them and then implicate them as terrorists who stole the bomb. While they fail to secure the bomb, they succeed in foiling his plans.
• The entire plot of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days revolves around this idea: a girl is writing an article that requires her to act like a horrible date/girlfriend and get dumped; Matthew McConaughey's character is trying to get a lucrative advertising account instead of his two female coworkers. Their boss offers to give him the account if he can make a woman of the coworkers' choice fall in love with him. Since the girl's boss has just told the two women about her article, they specifically pick her out of the crowd for him to woo.
• The Hudsucker Proxy wherein the board of Hudsucker Industries, hoping to temporarily depress the company's stock price so that they may purchase a controlling interest before the deceased president's shares are available to be purchased by the public, intentionally chooses the apparently incompetent Norville Baines as the new president. However, Norville's new invention proves so popular that the stock price reaches record heights.
• In the 1942 Edward G. Robinson film Larceny Inc., three criminals open up a luggage shop next door to a bank so they can drill a hole through a wall in the basement into the bank's vault. But, the luggage shop actually starts turning a big profit and becomes successful, and later, the bank offers them thousands of dollars for the use of their basement so they can expand the vault, making the criminals wonder if it'd be better to just go straight.
• In the Polish musical comedy Lata dwudzieste... lata trzydzieste ("The 20s... The 30s..."), a set-up similar to The Producers is used as a Revenge plot against duplicitous partners of an oil-drilling engineer. After being swindled out of his profits and pay for a year of his work, he manages to wire all the company's capital into a small, seedy revue theatre... which, with all that money, flourishes into a successful establishment providing a steady profit. In the end, the oilers end up with the theatre as their only source of income, while the engineer gets their "useless" fields... only to discover oil there for real.
• Lobster Man From Mars: A Hollywood film producer screens a science fiction B-Movie in order to get out of paying millions in back taxes, only to go to prison when it's a great success.
• In the first Major League film, the new Cleveland Indians owner wants desperately to move the team to Miami, but due to the terms of the lease the team has with the city of Cleveland, she will only be allowed to move them if attendance drops below a certain figure. To this end, she assembles the sorriest bunch of losers she can find, but her plans are thwarted when the team starts winning. (Primarily because they find out about her plan, and really don't like the idea of being used.) This is an Enforced Trope, as the original script had the owner do this as a Reverse Psychology Batman Gambit to turn the team around and do better and succeed. Executive Meddling turned the owner into a generic villain who wanted to sell off the team for petty gain.
• In Man of the Year, Robin Williams plays a Jon Stewart analogue who protests the corruption in politics by running for president himself as a joke. He wins due to a bug in the voting machines' programs that awards the most votes based on some obscure formula involving double letters.
• The Charlie Drake movie Mister Ten Per Cent has a crooked producer putting on a terrible play by a writer/construction worker in order to have a deliberate flop that he can collect insurance on; naturally, it becomes a hit and the writer has to deal with the fact that he sold 110% of the profit. Naturally, his attempts to sabotage the play only end up making it more successful. Interestingly, despite having a very similar plot to The Producers, this film was made a year beforehand.
• The Mouse That Roared features a tiny European nation planning to avoid bankruptcy by declaring war on the United States, then quickly surrendering and receiving post-war aid. Unfortunately, their military force happens to stumble upon a scientist working on an experimental continent-busting weapon of mass destruction, and captures him and the bomb just to be safe. The leaders of the country are horrified to realize that, not only did they fail to lose the war, but are now a legitimate threat to the United States.
• Nancy Drew: While Nancy and her dad, Carson, are staying in Los Angeles for a few months, two girls named Inga and Trish take her to a high-end clothing store in LA, under the assumption that the people at the store will ridicule Nancy for her old-fashioned style (at least in their opinion). Much to Inga and Trish's astonishment, the fashion expert instead criticizes Inga and Trish's clothes — saying that they're tacky and mismatched — and praises Nancy for her matching, preppy, sophisticated look, even photographing her for their magazine.
• The 1964 movie starring Maurice Chevalier, Akim Tamiroff, and Mike Connors (later of "Mannix"), filmed in Italy as Operation Fiasco but released in the USA as Panic Button. This film is a comedy about a crooked producer who deliberately makes an inept movie so that he can get a tax write-off when the movie flops; he is stymied when the movie is an unexpected hit.
• The Trope Namer is Mel Brooks' The Producers, in which two theatrical producers sell 25,000% of the production to investors and plan to create a play that will close on opening night, receiving almost no income, and therefore net them a substantial profit from the unused investment, since the IRS doesn't investigate flops. Their efforts to create a flop result in a blatantly pro-Nazi musical called Springtime for Hitler, a production starring a spaced-out hippie (or, in the musical and its 2005 film adaptation, the Camp Gay director) as Hitler. Unfortunately for the producers, thanks to the ridiculous performance of the actor playing Hitler (either because he's a talentless, spaced-out hippie, or the genuinely talented but gleefully Camp Gay director) audiences mistake the musical for a satire and love it. Because the play does not flop, the producers will be completely unable to pay back their investors, resulting in their exposure for investment fraud.
• This is the basic plot of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo's superiors send him to Vietnam in order to search for US prisoners of war, in the expectation that he will find nothing, and in doing so free the United States from having to pay reparations to the Vietnamese government. As it turns out, Rambo finds the prisoners after all, and despite attempts by his superiors to abandon him in Vietnam, he successfully brings them back home.
• In Ruthless People, Danny DeVito's character's wife is kidnapped the day he was planning to kill her. He refuses to pay her ransom, hoping that the kidnappers will kill her and do his dirty work for him. Instead, she ends up forming a close bond with the kidnappers.
• Al Pacino's character in S1m0ne tries to do this when the eponymous Simone (a movie actress who is, unknown to any but him, completely computer-generated) becomes too popular. His attempts include having her "direct" a movie that features her eating pig slop and going on a TV interview and saying she likes to eat dolphin meat. All of this just makes Simone more popular with people praising her for "speaking her mind" and taking artistic risks. Pacino's character eventually resorts to faking Simone's death and erasing the program which just gets him accused of murdering her. He tries to prove that she was fictional all along but by this point nobody believes a word he says.
• Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks has the main characters buy a property next to a bank with the same MO. In order to make their front more convincing, the wife bakes cookies which prove so popular that, almost overnight, they become an immense multi-national corporation with seemingly no chance of failure. Then comes the second act where they have to figure out how to adjust to the wealthy lifestyle.
• Spies Like Us has the mission of Fitz-Hume and Milbarge. They were supposed to be decoys to attract attention away from the actual mission. However, the actual mission goes south when one of the spies is killed and the decoys end up having to assist the survivor. Then, the actual goal of the mission (testing an anti-missile system) fails and the duo have to prevent World War III.
• A more dramatic version of this trope appears in the 1937 film Stage Door. Katharine Hepburn plays an aspiring actress who hopes to make it on Broadway, which is against her father's wishes. So her father invests in a play on the condition she star in it, and since she's not only a rookie but also questions everybody, it's thought the play will flop and she'll come back to her father. However, Hepburn finds out right before the curtain is to go up that The Woobie wanted the part she's playing and killed herself because she didn't get it. Completely heartbroken, Hepburn's character gives the performance of her life, critics love it, and the play becomes a smash hit, meaning she'll never go back to her father.
• In Stuck on You, Cher's character wants to get out of a detective show she's starring in. Hoping to get the show canceled quickly, she insists on hiring a co-star (Greg Kinnear) who has been unable to find work as an actor in Hollywood due to being attached to his conjoined twin (Matt Damon). Her plan blows up when the show becomes even more popular, and her co-star ends up becoming the show's Breakout Character.
• Ted:
  • The eponymous character tries to bomb his job interview at the grocery score deliberately. It doesn't go as planned:
    Manager: You think you've what it takes?
    Ted: What I've got is the scent of your wife's pussy on my breath.
    Manager: Nobody's ever spoken to me like that before.
    Ted: That's because everybody's mouths are full of your wife's box.
    [Beat]
    Manager: You're hired.
    Ted: Shit.
  • Later in the movie, Ted is caught doing lewd sexual acts with an employee on the clock, while he admits to selling a piece of produce used in the act to a family. The act gets him promoted for "having guts." Ted is not impressed.
    Ted: [to his manager after his promotion] You've got a lot of problems, don't you?
  • The epilogue reveals he was promoted to store manager after being caught eating potato salad off of someone's butt.
• In the 2001 Japanese movie Waterboys, a boys' synchronized swimming club asks a dolphin trainer to help them train. Uninterested, he makes them do chores for him, drags them around various places and takes every opportunity to ditch them in hopes that they'll give up. He's shocked when the "training" actually improves their skills by leaps and bounds.
• The Whale: Implied. Ellie reports Thomas' secret to the latter's family, to which they manage to reconcile with him through forgiveness. Charlie interprets this as Ellie doing him a favor, but her nasty attitude throughout most of the film suggests that it was actually a misfire of her trying to humiliate Thomas, as she didn't consider the possibility that they might want to reconcile with him after all.
• The protagonist of What a Way to Go! hates money and wants to live a simple life with a man she loves. So she marries a poor man she loves very much. Through incredible good luck, he suddenly becomes rich, then due to incredible bad luck, he dies, leaving her a rich widow. Then, with another man, it happens again. Then again. And again. She finally lands one who keeps failing, and they live happily ever after.