Dijonnaise's title has no obvious connection to the subject matter, unless we see it as a clue to what is in the man's bowl. The cut-and-shut combination of the words Dijon mustard and mayonnaise was actually a Friend invention, and he sold the name to Heinz in 1951 for an amount far greater than anything he received for his film. He repeated this trick of collapsing words together to invent a new one in order to title his next film, Brunch (1941), in which we see a woman eating a meal that is neither breakfast nor dinner, but somewhere in between, and with Ham-Fisted (1943), in which we see a man with a ham for a paw attempt, clumsily, to eat himself. The films were screened in basements and bars, or they would be sneaked into studio screening rooms late at night, an audience assembled by word of mouth, the titles being whispered like new words in the language for the first time, because that's what they were.

[...] Perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At the Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theatre in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move. Unlike much of the distracted audience, it simply watches the screen for the duration of the film. THe Technicolor melodrama of Rebel seems so distractingly different when seen in greys, and Friend's detached presentation of the excitable youths on camera (and on the screen on camera) articulates the confusion of the generation gap almost as well as Nicholas Ray's masterpiece itself, but from the other side: by this point Friend was well into his fifties.