Word: sal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Danny Deck, the hero of McMurtry's earlier novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, has earned more than $300 million as the writer-producer of a TV sitcom called Al and Sal. Retired at age 51 in the mansion he has built on an isolated hill in Texas, he dreams of writing a novel and keeps in touch by telephone with a network of glamorous actresses scattered about the globe. One morning he receives a call and hears an unfamiliar female voice: "Mr. Deck, are you my stinkin' Daddy...
...takes place on one very hot day at Sal's Famous Pizzaria in Bedford Stuyvesant, a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn where the general undercurrent of class and race resentment is kept under pressure by the heat until it explodes in violence...
Particularly outstanding performances--in an excellent cast--are given by Lee and Danny Aiello, who plays Sal, the owner of the pizza shop. Both succeed in their very human and confused portrayals of characters torn in many directions...
...Sal has maintained his business for decades in the same neighborhood, proud to have seen the local kids grow up on his food. But, despite his generosity and warmth for Blacks in the neighborhood, he is also capable of racism and violence when local Black youths disturb his romantic and idealized version of his life...
...morning after igniting the riot, Mookie slinks back to demand that Sal pay him his week's wages. Behind the camera, Lee wants the same thing: to create a riot of opinion, then blame viewers for not getting the message he hasn't bothered to articulate. Though the strategy may lure moviegoers this long hot summer, it is ultimately false and pernicious. Faced with it, even Mister Senor Love Daddy might say, "Take a hike, Spike...