Medical and memorial messages have been filling this space for quite a while, so it's probably time to climb back in the saddle and start up again. I've had these two New York pieces written in my head for some time, so before I forget what I wanted to say, I'd better write them down.

At one point in late August or early September, when I was visiting Bev daily in the nursing home, I rented the 1992 film "Scent of a Woman". We had seen it when it came out, and since it's such a classic, I wanted to see it again. Also, I had an ulterior motive. There was something I had seen earlier in the closing credits that I wanted to check out again and elaborate on, and I caught it. HOO-ah!

This is the film in which Al Pacino initiated his HOO-(high note) ah! (lower note) at times of success or exhiliration. HOO-ah! has become a Pacino signature. The film won him an Oscar as Best Actor (Hoo-ah!), and was also nominated for Best Director, as Best Film, and for Best Adapted Screenplay.

This is not a film review. My purpose is to unearth within this film a language connection and a travel connection, one in the form of an urban experience, specifically a New York experience. (“Spoiler” warning: if you have not seen this film but plan to, most of what happens will be revealed here. Of course, knowing what happens never stopped me from seeing this particular film over and over.)

Homage (AH-mij or HAH-mij) is the English word that means an act of respect in general. Spell it with two M's as hommage (oh-MAZH), and you now have the French word, also used in English, referring to a specific act of artistic respect.

Chita Rivera is a legend in Broadway musicals. She was in the original West Side Story, and the original Chicago, for instance. A few years ago she was honored as one of the five recipients of the Kennedy Center awards. When Bev and I saw the recent, great, film of Chicago, there's a scene where Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) is about to meet the Matron (Queen Latifah). Roxie makes a general comment and looks over her shoulder, where an older inmate says a few words in response, after which the camera goes right back to Roxie.

We saw the film in Tampa, and there was no stir in the theater at all. I wonder what would have happened in a New York theater. But I bubbled to Bev about the older inmate: "That's Chita Rivera!". They clearly had decided to do an hommage to Chita Rivera by giving her a cameo, because she had been in the original production.

Fay Wray died recently in New York. Her obituary in the Times said she had been asked to do a cameo in the remake of King Kong some years ago as an hommage, but had declined for her own reasons.

Hommages, however, are often obscure--very obscure, as you'll note on the language hommage in Scent of a Woman.

Pacino plays Frank, a blind, retired military officer, who, as it turns out, is depressed and suicidal. He travels from New England to New York City for a last fling or two with his upper-teen-aged companion Charlie (Chris O'Donnell).

I had noticed years ago in the closing credits that the film was based on an Italian work, "Profumo di donna", which this time I could see was some sort of a novel or part of a novel. Further online research shows it was also an Italian film from 1974 with Vittorio Gassman. "Donna" is Italian for "woman", so Profumo di donna ("Perfume-of-woman") is well translated as "Scent of a Woman".

The title refers to how the blind Frank meets women. There are two scenes in the film where he compliments women he's meeting either on their perfume, or fancy bath soap, which he can identify by name.

They're staying at the Waldorf Astoria, but the scene of interest is where they to go to dine in the Oak Room of the Plaza, where continuous tango music is being played.

Now this is a point, one of many, where credulity is strained. I don’t think the Oak Room has an orchestra. If they do, I doubt if they'd play five (beautiful) tangoes in a row, as they do in the course of this scene. And I doubt if the room would watch Pacino and partner doing a solo tango across the floor. But you believe, because it’s fun to believe.

Frank and Charlie see a young woman at a table (Gabrielle Anwar) waiting for her date. Frank charms her, identifies the fragrance of her scented soap, and asks her to dance. She's always wanted to tango, but doesn't know how.

It is a thing of beauty how two non-professional dancers like Pacino and Anwar slink across the floor doing the tango, right up to the end, where he gracefully dips her, and she wraps her left leg behind his leg. Perfect. Of course, credulity is stretched, since this is supposedly her first tango. But let's not get picky. Large swaths of the film are on YouTube. I’ve selected some scenes of particular interest, especially the more complete (read “longer”) clips. Here’s the one that’s pertinent here: Oak Room Tango: Por una cabeza

So that's the famous tango scene. “Por una cabeza” was written by Carlos Gardel of Argentina in 1935; he died in a plane crash later that year. Gardel was the most prominent figure in the history of the tango. The title means “By a Head”, as when describing a narrow win in a horse race, where in English we would actually call it winning “by a nose”. The reference in both the original song and in this film is apparently just barely being successful in getting to know someone. So where's the language connection I mentioned earlier? When Pacino says at the outset "I'm Frank--and this is Charlie" the line written for Anwar to say is "And I'm Donna." Do you get it?

Naming the character Donna is without a doubt an hommage to the Italian origins of the story. And it gives an entirely new double meaning to "Profumo di donna", which now means simultaneously "Scent of a Woman" and "Donna's Scent", both of which make sense within the confines of the story. But this is obscure enough that I wasn't able to realize it the first time around at all--since I didn't know there were Italian origins until the end credits, how could I have caught Donna's name early on in the film? Anyway, HOO-ha!

One connection down, the language one, and one to go, the travel-in-New-York one.

The other connection I wanted to discuss involves the car scene. Charlie doesn't know yet that Frank's having a last fling at things he enjoys because he's suicidal. Frank then says he wants to have a chance to ride in a Ferrari. He convinces (bribes) the car salesman to let Charlie use his learner's permit to take the car out for a test drive with himself as a passenger "at the edge of town, on the waterfront". There are then some fun scenes on almost deserted streets in an older, perhaps 19th Century neighborhood, of the car zipping down the streets and across intersections. But then Frank says he wants to drive. He convinces Charlie to steer from the passenger side. Whizzzzz. Down the side streets there are views of older bridges. Finally a cop pulls Frank over, at a spot with the Brooklyn Bridge and the skyline of Lower Manhattan across the way clearly visible. Watch it on YouTube: Ferrari Drive Frank parks, doesn't indicate he's blind, talks with the cop, and convinces him to let them off.

Now, suspend credulity again, for the fun of the film: the salesman letting himself be bribed, a blind man driving, the cop not catching on. Put it on to Frank's skills. (But the lack of traffic and few parked cars--that's off the wall!)

But wait. The big auto showrooms are on the West Side in the 50's. There's no quiet “edge of town” there. The older buildings and views of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges would indicate lower Manhattan, quite a distance from the showroom. But why does the scene with the cop show the Manhattan skyline across the (East) River?

So then I had an epiphany. HOO-ha! The car scenes weren't shot in Lower Manhattan; they weren't shot in Manhattan at all. They were shot across the river in Brooklyn, specifically the oddly-named neighborhood of Brooklyn called Dumbo, artfully cleared of traffic and parked cars for the film.

Picture looking at Manhattan across the East River from Brooklyn. The famous neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights is on your left, up on the hill. To the right is the former Brooklyn Navy Yard, now an industrial park. And between them lies Dumbo.

The left side of Dumbo is the historic district around Old Fulton Street, where the Fulton Ferry used to run. I have a favorite restaurant here. To the right is the Vinegar Hill Historic District. And in between are Civil-War era buildings, now being converted to apartments, one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city and very artsy.

The most striking feature of the neighborhood is without doubt the fact that it lies under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. This side in Brooklyn is more impressive than the Manhattan side, since both bridges, which are maybe at a 30-degree angle to each other and come within a block or two of each other on the Brooklyn side, hover impressively over your head. They are beautiful from below, and look even huger than they are. They lumber like elephants right above; indeed there's a point where a pillar of the Manhattan bridge sits on a corner at an intersection like a huge elephant's foot, and you have to drive carefully around it, since it blocks part of the intersection. It’s a very 19th-Century way to do things.

The name Dumbo, of course, is stupid. It was coined some years ago to bring attention to this area of artists, and because it's so odd, I suppose it's worked. It supposedly stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. How contrived can you get. "Down Under" is redundant; so is "Bridge Overpass". That would leave you with UMB having any significant meaning: "Under the Manhattan Bridge". But that continues the foolishness, since only half is under the Manhattan Bridge, and the other half is under the more famous Brooklyn Bridge. The whole naming goes from inanity to inanity. I hereby propose a new name for this neighborhood, "Underbridge", but I know it won't catch on.

As a digression: why would you imagine Disney called his cartoon character Dumbo? It seems logical that he was referring to the name of the most famous elephant ever, Jumbo, humorously combined with "dumb". The influence of Jumbo on the language is significant. When Barnum brought him over from Africa in the mid-19th Century, the elephant was so large, it caused a sensation. When Jumbo died, Barnum had him stuffed and continued exhibiting him. To this day, anything larger than large is called jumbo size, and yet when people say that, they no longer think of an elephant. And then, of course, there's the well-known oxymoron: jumbo shrimp. End of digression.

Although I’ve now made my “Donna & Dumbo” connections, it’s a shame to leave the film without taking a look at a couple more of the best and most famous scenes. This is the most emotional: Near-Suicide: "I'm in the dark here!"

It is interesting to see how actors prepare for a scene like this. How do you get that much emotion going, beyond what the dialog offers? Apparently some browbeating helped. It’s reported that, in order to make O’Donnell cry so effectively for this scene, Pacino took him aside between takes and actually screamed at him “drill-sergeant style”. In any case, it worked. Of course, having an actor as good as Pacino browbeating you as though it were real would make anyone bawl like a baby.

But of the famous scenes, beyond the tango, the Ferrari, and the near-suicide, the climactic speech that surely won Pacino his Oscar, the speech that certainly competes with Jack Nicholson’s climactic courtroom “You Can’t Handle the Truth” speech to Tom Cruise in “A Few Good Men”, is Pacino’s “Out of Order” speech at Charlie’s school assembly back in New England. A complete video of the lengthy scene is no longer available, but we can piece together two overlapping clips. Watch the first part of the speech up to the gavel banging “Out of Order”, then stop, because the overlapping starts there: Speech Part 1 Then watch the balance here: Speech Part 2

If I listen to that speech many more times, I’ll be in danger of memorizing it. Although there is an additional scene at the very end of the film, the last scene we see here at the school is outdoors, where Frank once again identifies a profumo di donna, again quite correctly, this time as “Fleurs de rocaille”, so he has not lost his olfactory, and thereby social, skills. But as nicely as Pacino pronounces the French name, the English translation he was given to express is inaccurate (picky, picky). The scent produced by Caron since 1933 does not translate as “Flowers from a Brook” as he says. A rocaille is a rock garden, so “Fleurs de rocaille” is “Rock-Garden Flowers”. Hoo-ah.