Oysters, snails, and a most satisfying quiz win

At a world-cinema-themed quiz conducted last month by whysoQrious (Adittya Nath Mubaiyi and Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi) at Depot48, Greater Kailash-2, our team… won. This was certainly a first for me (not that I have much of a history in quizzing; mainly just attending a few of these informal monthly quizzes over the past two or three years). And the win was thanks largely to the heavy-lifting done by the taciturn Uday Bhatia (his first appearance at one of these) and quizzing veteran Tathagata Chatterjee.
 
Nikhil Kumar and I – the other two participants – were mostly content to be spectators, but the final, tie-breaking question was one that it might be said I had prepared for over 34 years. It involved Spartacus and the famously censored snails-and-oysters scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis, which I had read trivia about in cinema books during my nascent obsession with Old Hollywood in the early 1990s. (I watched Spartacus for the first time in mid-1991 - it was one of my major entry points into Old Hollywood, as mentioned in this 20-year-old post - but the version I saw then didn't have the snails-and-oysters line. I probably first heard about the story from Kirk Douglas's memoir.)
Anyway, as Nirupama Kotru (a former team-members, not with us last night but hovering about in spirit like a relentless kotri bird) pointed out, the Spartacus question was my Slumdog Millionaire moment.
 
P.S. the team name, suggested by my punster friend Tipu, was “Jaani Hall” or “Jaani All” (a tribute to Diane Keaton, who had died the previous day, and Annie Hall). The Bengali “Jaani” turned out to be prophetic too - since the very first question, which Tathagata gleefully pounced on, involved Ray’s Charulata. (And a later question featured Ray’s short film Pikoo.)
 
P.P.S. Tathagata has an entertaining public post on FB about the evening, which you can read here.