Insectoid moon dwellers in H.G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon" / SAT 10-12-24 / Brother of Lech and Czech in Slavic lore / Texter's "off-line" / Online home services marketplace / ___ Thai (Vietnamese fruit cocktail) / Like Mount Terror and Mount Terra Nova / Lubricants used in oil drilling / Anna ___ first Italian to win an acting Oscar / First name in classic horror / Invite qualifier, for short / Zest for life: Abbr. /

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Anna MAGNANI (39D: Anna ___, first Italian to win an acting Oscar) —

Anna Maria Magnani (Italian: [ˈanna maɲˈɲaːni]; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters.

Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting", an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Italian – and first non-native English speaking woman – to win an Oscar.

After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of "earthy lower-class women" in such films as L'Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was "one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo". (wikipedia)

• • •

A real up-and-down, high-and-low experience, this one. Those stacks are really nice—clean, crisp, clear, colloquial. Often, with stacks of long answers like that, the short answers holding them in place can get pretty dicey, but generally, I thought those (mostly) short answers held up. There's nothing that made me go "absolutely not!," at any rate. So just in terms of filling the grid, the top and bottom seem very nice. The middle of the grid is less flashy, less interesting, choppier, but it generally holds up. I could be very happy not seeing the word DECOCT ever again in my life, but we all have our burdens to bear, and I can bear that one. The middle does have the great "AM I NUTS?," so ... you take the good, you take the bad, as they say (in the theme song for The Facts of Life, among other places, probably). My problem today wasn't with the fill so much as the absurdly (at one point, literally laughably) trivial and technical cluing on some of these answers. Just arcane stuff from all these different areas about which my knowledge is not exactly deep. Areas like "Mountain biking moves" (they have "moves"?) and oil drilling (MUDS!?) and Slavic lore—that's the one that really got me. I have "RIDIC" written in the margin next to RUS (21A: Brother of Lech and Czech in Slavic lore). RUS is already bad fill, the kind you want solvers to just ignore, so your only good option there is some clue for the actual country of RUSsia. "Slavic lore," LOL. Sure, Jan. I watch so many (So Many) movies (~1/day since COVID made a cinephile out of me), but all my viewing did not prepare me for a character played by an actor I've never heard of (Kieron Moore?) in a movie I've never heard of (David and Bathsheba?). URIAH filled itself in easily from crosses, but yeeeeesh. ANTARCTIC mountains (3D: Like Mount Terror and Mount Terra Nova) ... non-Guevara CHEs (22A: ___ Thai (Vietnamese fruit cocktail)) ... Insectoid Moon Dwellers (!?!?) (11D: Insectoid moon dwellers in H.G. Wells's "The First Men in the Moon"). Trivia trivia trivia ... it was really really really leaning on trivia for the "difficulty." There's still a healthy dose of tricky wordplay, but this puzzle felt slightly old-fashioned in the amount of arcana it wanted you to come up with. RUS, LOL. It's like when you used to have to know three-letter European rivers of no note. Lots of love for the stacks today, but a handful of UGHS for some of these clues.

This puzzle felt very hard at first. With stacks like this, I generally make a pass at all the (mostly) short Downs before I ever look at the Acrosses, and that strategy paid off today. I had what felt like almost nothing after my pass at the Downs up top. In fact, I had just five, most of them non-adjacent, and only one of which (HOTH) I was dead certain of. And yet from just those five answers ... bam!

[forever doomed to misspell BIALY!]

I left out a sixth answer there, actually, because it was wrong: I had OOO ("out of office") tentatively (and erroneously) written in at 12D: Texter's "off-line" (IRL) (short for "in real life"). But even with that wrong-o in there, I was able to see "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE"—my highly ironic gateway answer! Totally blocked trying to come out of the NW. For all I knew those mountains at 3D: Like Mount Terror and Mount Terra Nova were ANT...ILLEAN? ANTIPODEAN? ANT-RIDDEN? Maybe they're the mountains where the SELENITES live, I dunno. Couldn't see SHAMED or TEAM UP (me: "TEAM...ER? A TEAMER? That's not a thing!"). So I abandoned that area, and, as you can see (from where the cursor ended up in the screenshot of my finished grid), didn't return to that area until the very end. There's no other part of the grid that really stopped me in my tracks, but I definitely had to work for it today. There's only one square that looks like it could end up in Natick territory. I had -UDS at 39A: Lubricants used in oil drilling and was fully prepared to believe ... well, anything. SUDS. Those seem ... lubricantish. Just lucky that I knew who Anna MAGNANI was (39D: Anna ___ first Italian to win an acting Oscar). I don't know that I've seen her in anything (the '50s in general and non-crime / non-Giallo Italian cinema in particular being a couple of major holes in my cinema experience), but hers is a name I've heard a lot. MUDS / MAGNANI seems like it has wipe-out potential (MUDS MAGNANI, also a great potential gangster nickname). I don't see any other wipe-out squares, but with this much trivia, this many names, it's always possible I'm missing something. 

Explainers / Complainers:

• 15D: Blissful patch (EDEN) — is it just a "patch"? I always imagined EDEN as somewhat more ... extensive. Maybe it's being used metaphorically. Not the EDEN, but an EDEN, i.e. any idyllic place.
• 18A: Put down (SHAMED) — in pretty typical Saturday fashion, the cluing really leans into word ambiguity today. Easy to read "Put down" in the sense of "put down your gun!" or "put down an uprising" etc. The "Lofty" passages at 41A: Lofty passages are literally lofty, and not metaphorically "lofty," like poetic passages, as the phrase implies. The "Set" in 23A: Set against? (NAYS) are a "set" of people who are "against" something, i.e. a noun, not a verb. The "flashers" aren't perverts in the park, but the things on your car that WARN other drivers that there's a car stopped in an unexpected place. The "drafted" in 34D: No longer drafted, say (SENT), is not a professional sports "drafted" but a correspondence "drafted" (i.e. "drafted" as in "written"). The "Lead" in 56D: Lead follower: Abbr. (DET.) is not an element, or or even just the word "Lead," but a thing a detective might follow in order to solve a case. The "figures" in 14D: Corporate figures (LOGOS) could've been anything: people? financial figures? This ... is Saturday.
• 20A: First name in classic horror (LON) — more old movies. In a bizarre coincidence, I watched LON Chaney earlier this week in Tod Browning's The Unknown (1927), where he plays an (apparently) armless knife thrower in the circus who falls in love with a woman (young Joan Crawford!) who can't stand being touched by men. To tell you any more would be to give away crucial surprises. It's only about an hour long, on the Criterion Channel. Bizarre as hell, and worth it!

• 40A: Zest for life: Abbr. (SYN) — "Zest" and "life" are (in some contexts) SYNonyms.
• 22D: Pair of accessories? (CEES) — as in, there are a "pair" of CEES in "accessories"—they're really bringing out every clue trick in the book today!
• 47A: Invite qualifier, for short (BYO) — Bring Your Own (usually Beer, but can refer to any alcohol, really)

• 50D: Online home services marketplace (ANGI) — née "Angie's List"; I saw ads for this once and thought "Oh, god, we're gonna see ANGI in the grid at some point, aren't we?" So ... no problems for me, but maybe problems for thee.
• 43D: Melodramatic cry of appreciation ("MY IDOL!") — man this really Really wants to be "MY HERO!" That is the cry, specifically from melodrama—save the girl tied to the train tracks, and the first thing she exclaims is "MY HERO!" Absolutely standard melodrama stuff! I just don't think "MY IDOL!" gets "cried" nearly as much, and certainly not in "melodramatic" situations.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Selene is the ancient Greek goddess of the moon, which was how you were supposed to be able to infer SELENITES, if you didn't know it outright. I knew the goddess, so the SELEN- part was OK, but I had them as SELENIANS ... a much cooler, more sci-fi-worthy name, imho

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