Notes for Gemelo 5

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Observer barred puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Gemelo 5 Plain

Solver difficulty rating

3.5 based on 43 votes (voting is now closed)

Please give your own G-rating for this Gemelo puzzle by clicking on the relevant star above, with one star representing a very straightforward solve by your own standards (Gentle) and five stars indicating a seriously tough one (Ghastly). If you accidentally select the wrong star, you can change your vote by simply clicking on a different one. Each solver will be using their own yardstick, but by reflecting the average solver rating for the preceding puzzles I hope in the coming weeks to be able to give a good feel for the relative perceived difficulty of the latest offering. Note that hovering over the ‘graph’ icon will show you the full breakdown of votes for the current puzzle.

Last week’s puzzle achieved an average G-rating of 4.2 – no 1’s or 2’s (Mark Goodliffe clearly wasn’t among the voters), a handful of 3’s, and plenty of 4’s and 5’s. That struck me as being a very fair assessment. It will be interesting to see how the rating for this week’s puzzle compares.

For myself, I thought that the puzzle was very clever and Showcased (geddit?) the setter’s skills, but I’d rather have a ‘special’ that demands something different from the solver as well as the setter – the most recent puzzle of that type was Azed 2,750, since which we’ve had 24 ‘straight’ solves. The clues were generally sound, but the twisting and twiddling required to accommodate the film titles resulted in occasional looseness, and anyone who wasn’t keen on the deceptive capitalization of letters in a couple of clues last week will have been close to apoplexy this time around. I’ve covered the normal 8+8 clues below, but just let me know if you’d like me to comment or provide assistance on any others.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 18a, “Covered in grime from Shakespeare in Love missing cheerio, sadly (6)”. This is an anagram (‘sadly’) of CHEERIO without (‘missing’) the usual single-letter representation of ‘love’, the answer being a Shakespearean word meaning ‘smoky’ or ‘grimy’. The question here surrounds the fairness of the italicized text ‘Shakespeare in Love‘. The formatting appears to mark these three words out as a single unit, but in the cryptic reading they belong to three different parts of the clue – ‘Shakespeare’ is part of the definition, ‘in’ is a link from the definition to the wordplay, and ‘love’ marks the start of that wordplay. Is it desirable for clues to feature typography such as this which is clearly intended to deceive the solver? In general, I would say ‘no’; however, there is a theme running through every clue in this puzzle, with all the film titles being shown in italics. I think that it is therefore reasonable in this specific instance to expect the solver to mentally remove the italics en masse and also to be prepared to eliminate unwarranted capitals when addressing the cryptic readings. The clues that I’ve commented on below are shown without the italics.

Across

13a Is Argo’s final ordeal almost providing line of brightness? (6)
The letters IS (from the clue), the last letter (‘final’) of ‘Argo’, and a four-letter word for one heck of an ordeal, lacking its last letter (‘almost’), combine to produce a word for a contour line linking places receiving equal amounts of sunshine.

14a How Gigi might represent one performance by way of reply? (8, 2 words)
When the word GIGI is cryptically manipulated by the (2,6) answer, it could furnish (ie ‘How Gigi might represent’) a (1,3) expression equating to ‘one performance’.

21a Obscure Eastern cut including coat from Ben-Hur (7)
The usual abbreviation for ‘Eastern’ and a four-letter word for ‘cut’ (as I hope that my lawn will be by the end of the day) contain (‘including’) the outer letters (‘coat’) from ‘Ben-Hur’. When the film debuted in 1959, Mort Sahl famously observed, “Love him, hated Hur”.

23a Ed’s spare Green Book joke (7)
A charade of a three-letter word for ‘green’, the single-letter abbreviation for ‘book’, and a three-letter word for a joke, almost always seen in a question along the lines of “Have you heard the ??? about the bishop and the crossword setter?” The answer is shown by Chambers as being Spenserian, hence the “Ed’s”.

26a Makes up for deficiencies while screening Lawrence of Arabia, initially carrying on (6)
A matryoshka of a clue, where a two-letter word for ‘while’ contains (‘screening’) the initials of Mr Lawrence (and, latterly, of his alter ego Mr Shaw), which themselves contain (‘carrying’) the letters ON (from the clue).

27a Characters beyond the first three in Rebecca rejected at all times (3)
The letters (‘characters’) in the word ‘Rebecca’ which are not within (‘beyond’) the first three positions in the alphabet (‘the first three’) are reversed (‘rejected’).

29a Written fragments of An American in Paris: the lost act (8)
The letters AN (from the clue) are followed by the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘American’, a French word for ‘the’ (in Paris: the’) and an anagram (‘lost’) of ACT.

33a Cult figure, burning to quit Oliver!, remains unchanged in this year (6)
A four-letter word for ‘burning’ is omitted from (‘to quit’) OLIVER, with the residue preceding a two-letter word meaning ‘remains unchanged’ and an abbreviation of the Latin for ‘in this year’.

Down

2d Overthrow barb with note supporting reaction to The Sting? (8, 2 words)
A five-letter word for a barb comes before the usual abbreviation for ‘note’ after (‘supporting’) a two-letter interjection which would be a likely response to a sting from a wasp or the like.

3d Reserve fund for opposite of The Sound of Music (4)
A double definition clue; determining whether ‘an interval of silence in music’ is the ‘opposite of the sound of music’ is left to the reader as an exercise.

5d Mock title of what would have been cut in The Life of Emile Zola? (7, 2 words)
The (3,4) answer satisfies the definition and also describes what, for a nineteenth century author, would have been essential tools of their trade, and would invariably feature a cut to enable variation in the flow of ink.

7d Pieces of eight distributed, having lost Grand Hotel manuscript (5)
An anagram (‘distributed’) of EIGHT, without (‘having lost’) the usual abbreviation for ‘grand’ and the letter represented in the NATO phonetic alphabet by ‘Hotel’, is followed by the two-letter abbreviation for ‘manuscript’.

12d He sculpted it, a nuisance about to upset stunts from Wings? (10)
A reversal (‘to upset’) of five elements – the two-letter abbreviation of the Latin for ‘he sculpted’, the letters IT (from the clue), the letter A (from the clue), a four-letter ‘nuisance’, and a single-letter abbreviation for ‘about’ (one of those which appears in Chambers but I have never seen ‘in the wild’).

19d Where paper is polled ahead of English Patient (8)
A three-letter word meaning ‘with close-cut hair’ or ‘polled’ precedes the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘English’ and a word for a person under medical treatment. The answer is shown as hyphenated, 4-4, by the OED, but Chambers gives it as a single word. 

20d Uplift Terms of Endearment alumni and staff in no way (7, 3 words)
A reversal (‘uplift’) of the last letters (‘terms’) of ‘Endearment’ and ‘alumni’ and a five-letter word for the sort of staff that might change hands several times in the course of a single lap.

22d Unfortunate struggle to cut Casablanca’s climax and make an impact (6)
A three-letter ‘struggle’ or ‘conflict’ deprived of (‘to cut’) the last letter (‘climax’) of ‘Casablanca’ combines with a word that has a figurative meaning of ‘to make a deep or irremovable impression’ (in which sense it usually appears in the passive voice)  to produce a noun which might, somewhat tautologically, be seen preceded by an epithet such as ‘miserable’.

(definitions are underlined)