Absence noted in vape pen ads / MON 11-13-23 / Claimed a victory, homophonically / Key of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 / 1996's "Dancing Baby" might have been the first one to go viral

Constructor: Benjamin Fink

Relative difficulty: Easy 

THEME:"CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!" (57A: "Isn't that mind-blowing?!" ... or a question on might ask about the answers to the italicized clues) — things you might be disinclined to believe:

Theme answers:

• CAMPAIGN PROMISE (17A: "I will never raise your taxes!")
• CUSTOMER REVIEW (28A: "This product changed my life! Five stars!")
• HOMEWORK EXCUSE (44A: "The dog ate it!")

Word of the Day: Peter LORRE (41A: Actor Peter of "M" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much") —

Peter Lorre (German: [ˈpeːtɐ ˈlɔʁə]; born László Löwenstein, Hungarian: [ˈlaːsloː ˈløːvɛ(n)ʃtɒjn]; June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964) was a Hungarian and American actor, first in Europe and later in the United States. He began his stage career in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before moving to Germany where he worked first on the stage, then in film in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre caused an international sensation in the Weimar Republic-era film M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang, in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls.

Of Jewish descent, Lorre left Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. His second English-language film, following the multiple-language version of M (1931), was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), made in the United Kingdom. Eventually settling in Hollywood, he later became a featured player in many Hollywood crime and mystery films. In his initial American films, Mad Love and Crime and Punishment (both 1935), he continued to play murderers, but he was then cast playing Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, in a B-picture series.

From 1941 to 1946, he mainly worked for Warner Bros. His first film at Warner was The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first of many films in which he appeared alongside actors Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. This was followed by Casablanca (1942), the second of the nine films in which Lorre and Greenstreet appeared together. (wikipedia)

Somehow the wordplay doesn't really seem to land. These are three arbitrary things one might not believe, and then there's this hypothetical question ... but is it a question "one might ask?" Who is one asking this question? Seems like, at a minimum, the revealer clue should have a "?" on the end of it, since the actual phrase, "CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!?," is being applied to contexts where one would never actually ask this question. "Question one might ask ..." Who? Oneself? And is this a sincere question, or more a statement posing as a question? I might wonder *whether* I can believe campaign promises or customer reviews or homework excuses; I might ask myself if *I* believe it. But there's not even a completely banal way I can imagine someone actually asking this question using these words in this order. If I can't imagine the context, or the questioner's interlocutor, then the whole premise just kind of falls apart, or at least buckles. Like, I get it, these are not believable things, great. The revealer phrasing—or the clue phrasing—just doesn't hit the mark. Also, it's all just a little too straightforward and boring. The revealer I *wanted*, when I was solving Downs-only, was "DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!"—an idiom that Merriam-Webster says is "used to emphasize that one should not believe a statement or sentiment." It just made sense. It also, sadly, didn't fit. Neither did "DO YOU BELIEVE IT?!" I had to go pick up the "C" and "A" (from SCAR and LASH) before I could see the "CAN." It just doesn't snap the way it seems to believe it snaps.