Word: melvins
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...forbids contact between them; it endangers his hard-won position. Ben's father Nate (Joe Mantegna) is distractedly against it too, though most of his attention is focused on his two troubled businesses--a failing burlesque house and a numbers racket threatened by an obstreperous black man named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones), who portends the violent, irrational '60s, just a historical nanosecond away...
...Little Melvin will bring Nate--a decent guy despite his shabby work--to an uncomfortable end. Indeed, no one in this movie gets what he or she really wants or deserves. Even the romance between Ben's older brother Van (Adrien Brody) and his Wasp princess Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy) ends badly, when her ethereal perfection turns out to be only skin- (and coiffure-) deep...
...somehow that doesn't matter. Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind...
...With the Crimson facing third-and-30 on its next possession, a Wilford bomb thrown 50 yards downfield was intercepted by Brown cornerback Melvin Justice and returned all the way back to the Crimson 18-yard-line. The Bear offense scored off the turnover, and Harvard was unable to come back despite driving into the red zone on its next two possessions. The final Crimson drive ended in a Wilford interception, the team's sixth turnover of the game...
After the game, Harvard Coach Tim Murphy spread the blame for Wilford's picks, two of which came at the hands of Brown sophomore defensive back Melvin Justice...