Comics & Criterion

Seven Cents, March 2023

1. Oh, hello! I didn’t see you coming. But you know what they say: “If crime showed on a man’s face, there wouldn’t be any mirrors.”

2. At least, that’s what one character says in “We’re No Angels.” It’s a movie with Humphry Bogart and Peter Ustinov, and that lovely line is uttered by neither of them. Tough luck, boys.

3. David Mamet didn’t keep that dialogue for his 1989 film by the same name, in which Robert de Niro and Sean Penn “pass themselves off as priests and pass by the police”...

4. …into “the safety of Canada.” Well, it’s no “Canadian Bacon.” Or is it? Speaking of faux-philosophical films streaming on Criterion (I watch during my semi-stretching quasi-yoga pseudo-sessions before breakfast), consider this gem from Billy Wilder’s “Ball of Fire”:

5. Scene: Aged medical professor inspects Barbara Stanwick’s throat, notes “slight rosiness.” She replies, “‘slight rosiness?’ It’s as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore!”

6. Well, maybe you had to be there. And by “there,” I mean reading “Mary Worth” in the Sunday comics. “Mary Worth” (weekly since 1938) remains the longest-running soap opera comic, far outlasting my favorite, “Apartment 3G.” I miss those three sassy and stylish young roomies in their big city apartment. It was like “Friends” without the boys, as drawn by Patrick Nagel.

7. Only titular heroine Mary Worth would say, in full color, on the Sunday Comics page of the San Diego Union Tribune, in 2022: “The great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as ‘the choice to will the good of the other.’” So give the old gal some credit.

xo MHH