Word: zoot
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Back in the '40s in Los Angeles, we males who wore baggy pants called them zoot suits or, in the case of the trousers alone, drapes. Well, maybe on the modern woman they are saggy or baggy. On us they looked good, or did we really look that ridiculous...
...tank and starts a blackout by zapping the brightly lit Santa Claus decorations on Hollywood Boulevard. A crazy pilot (John Belushi) flies a P-40 fighter-bomber to search for enemy aircraft but succeeds only in creating panic below. A riot breaks out between native whites and Chicano zoot suiters, and General Joseph Stilwell-yes, the General Joseph Stilwell (Robert Stack)-is in charge of restoring order. Meantime, a periscope, looking suspiciously like the snout of a shark, pokes out of the Pacific, and a submarine commanded by Toshiro Mifune slithers toward shore. Oh, my God! The Japanese! Then...
...sets, including a fancy art deco U.S.O. dance hall, all look real, and a few of the facts are real. A lone Japanese sub marine did bombard the California coast not long after Pearl Harbor, and a kind of panic resulted. There were also zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles, but they did not occur until later on, and it was not Stilwell who put them down (though he commanded the Third Corps at Monterey in the early days of the war). Spielberg has simply brought everything together in one mad moment. Says he: "It's about a week...
...Zoot Suit takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Mexican Americans who call themselves Chicanos. The place is Los Angeles in 1942, where a gang of pachucos (zoot-suited teenagers) were mass-convicted of a murder on virtually kangaroo-court terms. Street riots followed the next year...
...there had been a savory ethnic core to the musical, it might have taken flight, but both the music and the dances are grounded in standard World War II U.S.O. fare. A raging hit since its debut at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Zoot Suit, unlike California wines, has not traveled well...