Word: mutt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...overexcited mongrel of a film about a bank robbery. A high-spirited, sporadically funny film about a trivial event, Dog Day Afternoon is at odds with itself. Its mixed parentage--one part action shoot-out, one part ethnic sit-com, and two parts documentary--makes it an entertaining enough mutt, but hard to control. It wanders in several directions at once and over-whelms its charming moments in tedious incoherence...
...plot is apparently more suited to pulp melodrama than to serious fiction. Her book begins with a young black woman improbably named Ursa Corregidora and plunks her down in a seedy Kentucky dive in the 1940s where she works as a blues singer. Enter Ursa's jealous husband, Mutt Thomas, who hurls the heroine down a staircase, injuring her so badly that her womb has to be removed. Twenty years pass. Ursa's second marriage fails. Her career takes her no higher than another dive across town. But love is a torch song. In the end the blues...
...merely the loss of fruitfulness but the whole power to love). Indeed Corregidora could be dismissed as musings on the sordidness of some of life's more desperate characters if the novel did not manage to illuminate the wider question of the way all men need women. Mutt is the masculine principle in its surly, street-brother aspect. For him pride seems uppermost-the pain is mainly hers...
Certainly Breslin is not an objective reporter, and he doesn't pretend to be. He is as vicious to the Bad Guys as he is sympathetic to the Good. He describes Mardian as the type of man who "in the prize-fighting business, they used to call a mutt." And as he is about to begin the story, Breslin gets a little maudlin...
...ruminates, "how you forget the actual pain and power of birth -maybe so you'll try again"), the confession of Brad's first infidelity ("I forgive you," Betty responds promptly), and daily rounds like picking the kids up at school ("You know," Betty confesses to the family mutt, "we've got a lot in common-we're both retrievers...