1965 film starring George Segal that was set in a P.O.W. camp / WED 4-10-24 / Traditional crustless fruit pie / First U.S. Secretary of War / Popular Italian entree, informally / Al Jolson's actual first name / Word derived from the Arabic for "lot" / Semiotician's interest

Constructor: Bill Thompson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: broken spells — words meaning (roughly) "spell" are "broken" inside longer answers (i.e. they are split into two parts that then bookend the longer answers):

Theme answers:

• CHARM (39A: Spell that's "broken" by 17-Across)
• CHICKEN PARM (17A: Popular Italian entree, informally)
• HEX (11A: Spell that's "broken" by 23-Across)
• HENRY KNOX (23A: First U.S. Secretary of War)
• POX (65A: Spell that's "broken" by 49-Across)
• PENCIL BOX (49A: Container in a kid's backpack)
• CURSE (37A: Spell that's "broken" by 59-Across)
• CRASH COURSE (59A: Intensive study program)

Word of the Day: KING RAT (42D: 1965 film starring George Segal that was set in a P.O.W. camp) —

King Rat is a 1965 American war film written and directed by Bryan Forbes and starring George Segal and James Fox. They play Corporal King and Flight Lieutenant Marlowe, respectively, two World War IIprisoners of war in a squalid camp in Singapore. Among the supporting cast are John Mills and Tom Courtenay. The film was adapted from James Clavell's novel King Rat (1962), which in turn is partly based on Clavell's experiences as a POW at Changi Prison in Singapore in the latter part of the Second World War. [...] Forbes was unhappy with what he felt was a misleading ad campaign. He said the film "made little or no impression in America, although it was given long and impressive reviews by the top-line critics — but I remain convinced that whatever chance it had was thrown away by run-of-the-mill and basically dishonest exploitation. Now it has become a cult film on the university campuses, but in 1965 when it was first shown Vietnam was still a clean war, and the American mass audiences were unlikely to take kindly to such a cynical view of human behaviour. It had no happy or heroic ending and said some unpopular things about the American dream. The real audience, the audience for whom it was intended, stayed away." (wikipedia) (my emphasis + extreme LOL)

• • •

I admire this puzzle's ambition. I don't think the theme quite works, in that the spells are technically "broken" by gibberish ("ICKENPA," "NRYKNO," etc.), not the whole of the longer theme answers, but insofar as those answers feature one part of the "spell" up front and the other part in the back, I suppose the clue phrasing is close enough. Eight answers makes for a very dense theme, and the grid definitely shows the strain in places (particularly the areas where the theme answers are closest together), but overall I thought the theme was handled reasonably well. The more fixed answers you have to begin with, the harder it is to fill your grid cleanly, and *eight* is a lot of fixed answers. But you handle those short "curses" by getting them as far out of the way as possible (HEX and POX tucked way back in highly sequestered corners, and CURSE and CHARM parked off to the side), and then you've got some room to lay down the long stuff. There's still theme material all over the place, but as a constructor you've got a little room to breathe. The grid we end up getting could be cleaner, but it's OK. You make the compromises you gotta make to pull off your theme, and hopefully those compromises aren't fatal. Today, I don't think they are. The execution may be only so-so, but the theme concept is well above average, so I'll take it. More credits than debits on the ledger today.

The theme answers were not forced, which is one of the things I liked about the puzzle. I don't really know who HENRY KNOX is (to be perfectly honest), but he's obviously an important historical figure, and his name rings a bell at least, and that's fine. The other themers are universally familiar things, though I do have a question about PENCIL BOX, which is "Whose child?" and (follow-up) "What year is it?" Do kids' backpacks still contain PENCIL BOXes!?!? If so, I couldn't be more thrilled. I have several pencil boxes in my desk drawer here, I love them. Pencils rule. But I thought "kids" were moving away from writing by hand generally, and even if they are still writing by hand, the PENCIL BOX (as a kids' school accessory) seems old-fashioned. Maybe it's an art thing? Are they colored pencils? Anyway, that answer felt slightly dated. Not INK WELL dated, but ... about halfway to INKWELL. I'm seeing kid-branded PENCIL BOXes online, so obviously kids still use them. I just wonder about what percentage actually have them in their backpacks on any given day. Also, I wonder how many tuxedo cats are named OREO (53D: Popular name for a tuxedo cat). Citation needed.

Things got rough for me right where the first two longer themers are closest to each other. Thematic density leads to ... trouble. The primary problem is ... isn't it APPLE BROWN BETTY???? Yes, yes it most certainly is. In fact, "Brown Betty" is the primary name of the dessert and "Apple"is the modifier, so you'd be on way way way more solid ground with BROWN BETTY than APPLE BETTY (?!!?) (21A: Traditional crustless fruit pie). For a brief moment there I thought there was going to be a rebus of some kind, a color rebus (BROWN) or a woman's name rebus (BETTY), or maybe not a rebus, but some other tricky thing going on where BROWN or BETTY was missing or hidden in some way. So APPLE BETTY was a major ear-thud. The crosses there were hard, or ugly, or ugly-hard. AWALK, awful, EXE, ugly, DARENOT, archaic, PAPPY, big spelling yikes, NPRTOTE, ugh, put in TOTEBAG without hesitating. There are other ugly places that were less difficult to work out, like the plural EMMAS (?) crossing the eye-crossingly dull ADRATES, but I was never so stuck (or annoyed) as I was in that APPLE BETTY thicket. The only other thing that truly bothered me about this puzzle came in the HOT MAGENTA thicket, which wasn't really a thicket, but did contain the puzzle's one inexcusably arcane answer: KING RAT. I love George Segal. I have seen many George Segal movies, not just the famous ones like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but deeper cuts like California Split (Elliot Gould!) and The Quiller Memorandum and Fun With Dick and Jane (Jane Fonda!) and Carbon Copy (Denzel Washington!). But KING RAT!? I watch movies and read about movies so I'm sure the title has crossed my field of vision at some point, but hoo boy, why do you drop an obscure movie title like that right in the middle of your Wednesday puzzle? Baffling. When the director himself says the movie "made little or no impression in America," and the movie in question is now 60 years old ... it's possible you wanna move in another direction with your crossword answer.

Notes:

• 19A: Al Jolson's actual first name (ASA) — Al Jolson? Really? This is what's called "underlining your bad fill." I don't know why you do this.
• 42A: Actress Palmer with a reduplicative name (KEKE) — Very much appreciate the "reduplicative name" part, because, while this actress has had a long career in TV and movies, they aren't TV or movies that I've seen (for the most part). 

• 64A: Word derived from the Arabic for "lot" (KISMET) — sincerely, this is the first answer I wanted for the George Segal movie, when I had just the "K" in place (it didn't fit, obviously, but it's the first thing that popped into my head). So weird to have it actually appear in the puzzle!

• 12D: Where runway 9 is always oriented at an airport (EAST) — ??? for takeoff or landing? If it's "oriented" EAST, is it not also oriented WEST? I'm so confused. I guess I don't know what "oriented" means here. Here's a guide to runway numbering. It says it's "simple" but my eyes quickly glazed over. Something about magnetic north ...
• 4D: Game piece? (TIC) — as in, "a piece of TIC-Tac-Toe." Or a piece of STICKBALL, whichever.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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