Word: apes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Because Candide is so farcical, (and any show that involves actors in ape suits is by definition a farce), you aren't likely to be emotionally affected by it in any deep way. But in this grimmest of all possible worlds, a fast-paced piece of pure entertainment is always welcome. It beats tending your garden...
Take simply the matter of visual style. His early films had a good workman's lack of clutter, and since Allen was almost as fond of visual parody as he was of the verbal kind, they showed an ability to ape the masters. Beginning with Sleeper (1973), a conscious coherence, a striving for a certain elegance came into his films, growing through Love and Death (1975), becoming lush and nicely jumbled in Annie Hall (1977), turning austere to the point of being mannered in Interiors...
King Kong, Carefully paced, often gripping, this thriller-fantasy set the style for most of the giant monster movies to come. Special-effects designer Willis O'Brien's giant ape was the source of awe and terror--even the camera froze on him while he did his stuff. To movie-goers of 1933, O'Brien's small moth-eaten model--which had to be moved ever-so slightly and filmed for a fraction of a second at a time--was a revelation, the ultimate fantasy. If Kong appears jerky and slightly ridiculous to us, it must have seemed...
...nymph, clearly carrying no concealed weapons, who hugged and kissed an unprotesting Charles. The Prince was also kissed by a young housewife and by an ecstatic elderly lady. Recalling similar smooching on Charles' previous Australian visits, the Melbourne Herald sought explanations from Body Language Expert Desmond (The Naked Ape) Morris, who blamed it on Charles' friendly grin. "If he scowled or showed alarm or just cultivated a blank expression, it wouldn't happen. Queen Victoria did this, and not many kissed her." Not many wanted to, for that matter...
...Most important, these handsome new editions reconfirm Edmund Wilson's 1944 judgment that Waugh "is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Characters like Lady Margot Metroland, Mayfair hostess and procuress of Decline and Fall, Mrs. Melrose Ape of Vile Bodies, the American evangelist modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson, Basil Seal, highborn wastrel of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast in Scoop, still delight because there are always new grotesques to fill the shoes of Waugh's caricatures...