More Mattresses

1976: Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), Taxi Driver

I can't find a photo of Rocky's crummy bed, but he does have a mattress leaning against his wall (for why?).
1976: Talia Shire & Sylvester Stallone, Rocky

It was easy to think of scenes of men in crummy beds in the '70s--does every era have these? 

I don't think so.

By 1998, men in bed looked like this:

From You've Got Mail ^

I assume Tom Hanks' Clinton-era character has a house cleaner. 

He's emailing Meg Ryan's character to advise her to "go to the mattresses"--a quote from The Godfather.

And she replies *:

These two are so good together, I watched the movie again years later, hoping it wasn't as bad as I remembered. 

But nope: what he does--running her indie bookstore out of business and then lying and lying and lying--(and its political message: learn to forgive & love Walmart... or, hm... Bill Clinton?) is just too awful.  

I recently saw--but, darn, can't find again--a revised ending for You've Got Mail in which Meg Ryan's character tells Tom Hanks to fuck off. 

(And he says, "Fair enough.) 

 _______________________________________

* going to the mattresses from Urban Dictionary:

Prepare for a battle or adopt a warlike stance.

In times of war or siege, Italian families would vacate their homes and rent apartments in safer areas. In order to protect themselves they would hire soldiers to sleep on the floor in shifts.

Ordinarily we would want to verify such stories before publishing them here as part of a phrase derivation. In this case though it isn't really important. The phrase wasn't well known outside of the USA and Italy prior to the Godfather movies. It was used there, and later in The Sopranos television series, to mean 'preparing for battle'. Whether or not the stories that originated it are true doesn't alter the fact that the screenwriters of those films used them in that context.