YMMV / Mona Lisa

• Alternate Character Interpretation: While it's obvious that Simone never reciprocated George's attraction and romantic interest, it's not clear whether she ever liked him as a person and as a friend, or if she was just cynically pretending to do so in order to use him to find Cathy and to protect her from her pimp. Her pointing a gun at George suggests that she despised him all along, though that may have been done in an irrational panic.
• Award Snub: Bob Hoskins was widely considered a shoo-in for the Academy Award for Best Actor after having swept practically all the preliminary accolades during awards season. However, he lost the Oscar to Paul Newman for The Color of Money. Many critics regarded Newman's win a Consolation Award for his memorable filmography throughout his enduring career, especially since he won an Honorary Oscar the year before.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • George buys a white rabbit as a gift for Mortwell. It was Bob Hoskins' performance in this film that led to him being cast in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with his other role that year, Sweet Liberty, proving he could pull off an extremely convincing American accent.
  • Michael Caine's Star-Making Role was the 1964 film Zulu about the Battle of Rorke's Drift. One of Hoskins' early movie roles was in Zulu Dawn, a 1979 film that was a prequel about the Battle of Isandlwana that occurred just before Rorke's Drift.
  • Caine and Hoskins (friends in life and frequent co-stars) acted together in Sweet Liberty in the same year and later appeared in several other films together.
• Iron Woobie: George was a low-ranking flunky of Mortwell who took the fall for his boss's crimes, served 7 years in prison, and wound up estranged from his wife and daughter. Afterwards, Mortwell shows his "gratitude" for George's silence by continuing to treat him like a doormat, assigning him thankless, petty, low-paying jobs. Meanwhile, George is humiliatingly exploited, rejected and almost killed by the lesbian he made the mistake of falling in love with. Yet apart from a handful of moments where he loses his temper, George takes it all in stride and has the strength of character to put his life back together afterwards.

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