You could argue that this standoff scene between Eddie Albert and Charles Grodin in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (’72) is Albert’s career-best moment. He’s playing an utterly humorless Midwestern banker who smells deceit and calls it out …and it’s beautiful.
Surely there are other noteworthy scenes in which an older, wiser, sharper character (man or woman) tells a young hustler (either gender) to cut the crap.
Written by Neil Simon: “I see through you. You don’t think I see through you? You could wear two wool sweaters and a raccoon coat, I’d still see through you. ‘There’s no deceit in the cauliflower’? Where do you get ideas like that? Do they just…do they just come out of that New York head of yours?”
