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Clip description
Detectives Hummer (Chris Haywood) and Crean (Andrew S Gilbert) are eating breakfast. Crean declines to eat his bacon, telling his partner he’s Jewish. Faced with his partner’s scepticism, Crean goes on to tell a series of outlandish stories about his background, such as being adopted by Mossad agents who were killed in a plane crash and his having a child with cerebral palsy. Hummer is gradually sucked in by Crean’s apparent sincerity, coming to the realisation he knows very little about the personal life of the man he works with every day. The storytelling over, Crean picks up the bacon and extravagantly pops it into his mouth – thus demonstrating everything he’s just told Hummer was a put-on.
Curator’s notes
At its start the scene echoes a conversation in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), in which Samuel L Jackson’s character explains that he refuses to eat bacon because pigs are dirty animals. However writer-director Bill Bennett gives this premise a markedly different spin. The scene earned some of the film’s loudest laughs from cinema audiences, though it also has a serious purpose, since it illustrates the film’s main theme: partners can live or work closely together on a daily basis and yet not truly know each other. The scene represents the only time in the film where the dialogue was fully scripted and not improvised on set.
