Word: pits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lemmon plays the lecherous landlord of the Centaur Apartments, a fellow who rents only to women and has a key for every lock. The minute he sees the heroine he starts weaving Lemmoniacal schemes to lure her into his "sin bin," a flat with blood-red wallpaper, passion-pit living room, bed about the size of Luxembourg, and two Murphy violins that hideaway in a closet and at the flick of a switch pop out and play...
...driving out for a day's sailing. They stop to pick up a brash young hitchhiker, whose insolence catalyzes their own hostility-and this three-cornered thriller quickly generates force. By the time they reach pierside, the two males are abristle, eying each other like cocks in a pit. "You're no match for me, but come aboard," taunts the older man. The boy accepts: "Ah, you want to carry on the game...
Then suddenly, its beat was stopped; the silence could almost be felt; until, after a pause, it was broken again by the sharper, more compelling clamour of the "algetas" (panpipes) and "gangas" (small kettle drums controlled by squeezing the strings under the arm pit whilst being beaten) of the challengers...
...trombone players vaulted out of the orchestra pit, swinging their horns like battle-axes. Then the woodwinds, a double-bass player and even the first violins joined in, tearing furiously into the astonished audience in pursuit of hecklers' blood. When the police arrived, chairs were flying through the air across the courtyard of Venice's Palazzo Ducale. It took a frantic half hour to drag all the punch-drunk musicologists out into St. Mark's Square for a cooling breath...
...soul. Baker never writes a noun without leashing a seeing-eye adjective to it, never overlooks a cliché, never fails to labor an image ("The windshield wiper describing its captive arc back and forth, back and forth, like that descending knife in the story of the pit and the pendulum...