Word: arkin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Enter Laughing. Carl Reiner's autobiographical novel about a stage-struck Jewish boy's first taste of ham was one of the delights of Broadway in 1963, thanks to Joseph Stein's knowing dramatization and to a winning performance by Alan Arkin as the fumbling hero. Now Reiner has directed a film version that sticks closely to the words of the play but destroys much of its sly insight into the dawning of awareness in darkest Bronx...
...Arkin used the whole man to embody adolescent chutzpah; Newcomer Reni Santoni seems able to draw on only a pout here and a wiggled eyebrow there, which is far from enough. Shelley Winters and David Opatoshu contribute a pair of luridly overdrawn caricatures as the well-meaning parents who stand by helplessly while their son switches his ambitions from pharmacy to footlights. By contrast, Jose Ferrer and Elaine May seem almost drawn from life as the flamboyant impresario of a pass-the-hat theatrical workshop and his daffy Duse of a daughter. Their world of raucous flea-bitten theatrics seems...
...Marie, MacLaine and her lover (Alan Arkin) scrawl "merde" on the walls of a flophouse hotel, dress up as bride and groom, and prepare to end their hopeless affair in a double suicide. She suggests pills, but Arkin refuses to play her end game. "I never took a pill in my life," he declares. "I always use suppositories." When she balks at death by suppository, he produces a pistol. She objects, they argue, and in tears she excuses herself to go to the w.c. Suddenly disillusioned with death-and with Marie-Arkin prepares to run for his life...
...MacLaine's. Despite heavy help from the makeup and wardrobe departments, she seldom departs from her customary screen self, and all seven women suffer from an unflatter ing family resemblance. Most of the blame, however, must fall on De Sica, who has wasted such talented actors as Arkin, Sellers, Michael Caine, Philippe Noiret and Vittorio Gassman in a ponderously directed, flaccid work. Better than anyone else, he should know that a tour de farce is like a striptease: there is no point in the performance if the material does not come off in style...
...Henry Livings, is incongruous, unpredictable and farcical. So is Dustin Hoffman's performance as a British "nit." So is Alan Arkin's direction. So is life...