Word: aping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many cases, the unkindest cuts of movie moguls have been restored decades later by heroic film scholars. Together again for the first time: King Kong, in which the great ape engages in vigorous foreplay with Fay Wray; Welles' Macbeth and Touch of Evil; Max Ophuls' magnificent melodrama Lola Monies; and Sergio Leone's great homage to John Ford, Once Upon a Time in the West...
...near Piltdown, England, an amateur fossil hunter named Charles Dawson "found" the first of two skulls with a human-like cranium and an apelike jaw. The find was hailed as the missing link between man and ape; for years Piltdown man occupied a prominent place in paleontology. Finally in 1953 he was unmasked: the remains were nothing more than a fabrication of modern human and ape bones doctored to give them the look of antiquity...
...funniest moment in the movie is a 90-second pantomime--"out of the clear blue sky," as George Bush would say--when a man starts imitating an ape, cradling a beer can, contorting his face, twisting his arms. And the best line in the movie belongs to Cheech; after their high-powered car has left the police in the dust, he turns to his partner and says, "That was too easy--let's let them catch up and start again...
...dash to safety. So, in an inspired gesture, Ramapithecus reached for a rock with both forefeet, reared back on his hind legs and heaved the stone at the predator. Startled to see this usually four-footed prey erect, the tiger cautiously retreated. But the ape-man's triumph was costly. Unaccustomed to the abrupt, upright position, he was left doubled over in agony with a piercing pain in his lower back...
...gives Sabbath a similar flightiness, the nervous soul of a girl who revels in sex and sin. Harry Dean Stanton is properly menacing as the conniving Asa Hawks who wants to torture Haze in a fraudulent game of redemption. Daniel Shor fusses and leaps about hilariously in an ape suit as the deranged Enoch Emery, whose new Jesus is a shrunken South American mummy stolen indiscreetly from the city MVSEVM. And Ned Beatty, the only "name" in the cast, appears fleetingly as the entrepreneurial Hoover Shoats...