Word: barone
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Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the wild-eyed, wild-haired grandson of the Baron von Frankenstein in a brilliant, highly personal take-off on the familiar character of the mad genius. He begins the movie as an American neurosurgeon frantically embarrassed by his ancestor's antiscientific shenanigans. Forced to journey to Transylvania to receive the Baron's will, he discovers the ancient laboratory and is seduced by his grandfather's dreams--providing the set-up for a spoof of every major scene in the original film, interrupted by the tangents of Brooks's imagination and concluded...
...Charles Adams cartoon character who later became known as Uncle Fester. He delivers one-liners like Groucho. Cloris Leachman, who does a terrific job of frowning and mugging through an unrewarding part, may have pilfered from Dame Judith Anderson's role in Rebecca as the forbidding keeper of the Baron's castle. Young Frankenstein stalks about with the mad intensity and even the cap and cloak of Sherlock Holmes (whose film image dates from the 1930s). "Chattanooga Choo-choo," a popular song of the '30s, resurfaces when Wilder leans out of the train window on arrival and asks, "Is this...
Died. Amy Vanderbilt, 66, doyenne of American etiquette; of injuries suffered in a fall from the window of her Manhattan brownstone. Great-granddaughter of a cousin of the rail baron Cornelius, she was born on Staten Island and began her career writing society columns in a local paper, went on to become a syndicated columnist. Her Complete Book of Etiquette (1952) sold almost 3 million copies, with such advice as where the father of the bride should sit if he and the mother of the bride are divorced. (Beside his new wife in the third pew behind the mother...
...estimable Ernest M. Frimbo is the Baron Munchausen of railroads, with a puff of Lucius Beebe and a chuff of Cervantes thrown in. Frimbo-the "world's greatest railroad buff'-is the brain child of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who has himself bumpety-thumped across 2,334,000 miles of rails from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Ill. By inventing Frimbo-lexicographer, gourmet, jazz fan, connoisseur of contessas and, of course, compulsive investigator of trains-Whitaker has transmuted what might have been a soda-water sermon on the glory and decline of the trains into a Jules Vernean adventure that...
Perhaps the author gives himself away when he discusses the "points" of the railroad track at the end of the book. Watson must regularly jump off the train to switch these points so that it will follow the route of the sinister Baron's locomotive. Over and over again our chronicler writes, the points must be switched: "And the points--the points are all wrong!" One can't help but sense that he is pointing fun at the defects of the traditional detective novel...