Dennis who fronted 1960s-70s Classics IV / SUN 6-7-15 / 2005 South African drama / Bonheur who painted Horse Fair / He died at Xanadu / 1971 top 20 hit with no English lyrics

Constructor: Samuel A. Donaldson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "The Call Of The Race" — clues are an imagined call of a race, where fill-in-the-blank clues are both appropriate to horse racing and wacky plays on words related to the names of the imagined horse in the clues:

Theme answers:

• 22A: "And they're off! Ace Detective has the ___!") (EARLY LEAD) — get it, because detectives get leads? Yeah, you get it. I'm not annotating the rest of these, on the assumption that you Get It.
• 28A: "Looks like Setting Sun is ___!" ("FADING FAST")
• 35A: "It's Pariah ___"! ("ON THE OUTSIDE")
• 56A: "Chiropractor heads into the ___!" ("BACK STRETCH")
• 64A: "Here's where Mississippi Delta often ___!" ("GAINS GROUND")
• 75A: "Now Carrier Pigeon takes the ___!" ("TURN FOR HOME")
• 95A: "But wait! Amex Card ___!" ("MAKES A CHARGE")
• 101A: "Almost there, and E Pluribus Unum will be ___!" ("IN THE MONEY") — fittingly, this answer does not seem very on-the-money.
• 114A: "But the winner is … Inseam ___!" (BY A LENGTH) — why "Inseam???"Because it is *a* unit of length? I think I'd rewrite my entire puzzle just so I could get a more wordplay-ish expression here at the end, like (BY A NOSE) (114A: "But the winner is … Cyrano ___!"). What a weird, anticlimactic ending.

Word of the Day: "TSOTSI" (38D: 2005 South African drama that won a Best Foreign Film Oscar) —

Tsotsi is a 2005 film directed by Gavin Hood and produced by Peter Fudakowski. It is a adaptation of the novel Tsotsi, by Athol Fugard and a South African/UK co-production . The soundtrack features Kwaito music performed by popular South African artist Zola as well as a score by Mark Kilian and Paul Hepker featuring the voice of South African protest singer/poet Vusi Mahlasela.

Set in an Alexandra slum, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the film tells the story of Tsotsi, a young street thug who steals a car only to discover a baby in the back seat.

The film won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. (wikipedia)

• • •

Yeah, no. Too easy, too corny, too much about stupid horse racing. Serena Williams won her twentieth (20th!!!) Grand Slam singles title this weekend, but all Americans can talk about is a horse with a misspelled name who ran fast three times. Booooo. But even if I didn't think this baloney once-a-year, pretend-we-care-about-horse-racing charade weren't a complete national embarrassment, I still wouldn't have liked this puzzle. It's cute in the way hallmark cards are cute. So, not actually cute. You can see the "humor" coming down Broadway. It's certainly competently made on a technical level, but solving it was just 9-ish minutes of me going "Yes, I see what you did there" every time I got to a theme answer. I have nothing  more to say about this puzzle. I miss yesterday's puzzle. MIRROR, MIRROR, take me away! Dammit, that's Calgon.

["… now with ALOE Vera."]

TO HOE or not TO HOE, that is the question (the answer is "not").

Bullets:

• 1A: Shopping lines? (UPC) — I immediately wrote in CPU, so it's a pretty awesome coincidence that one of the adjacent answers is DYSLEXICS (19D: Ones having a rough spell?)
• 41D: Suit in a Spanish card deck (OROS) — golds? I'd've sooner believed OSOS. Weird. 
• 49D: Bonheur who painted "The Horse Fair" (ROSA) — I don't know who that is, but that's not the problem. ROSA crossing ROSE (49A: Part of a Derby garland)—that is the problem.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Facebook and Twitter]

PS here's my write-up of last weekend's INDIE 500 CROSSWORD TOURNAMENT