Word: bonzo
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Virtually every male lead made westerns in the '50s, so Reagan was happily back on a horse in such ordinary oaters as Tennessee's Partner and Cattle Queen of Montana. His big hit of the decade was the silly Bedtime for Bonzo, a parable of cross-species adoption (Reagan and Diana Lynn try raising a chimp as a human child) in which the star spent much of his time with an animal perched in his lap or on his head. Though it gave his detractors much excuse for merriment, Reagan proclaimed himself proud of the film...
DIED. FRED DE CORDOVA, 90, producer of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson; in Los Angeles. Before starting at the Tonight Show, De Cordova produced TV programs for George Burns and the Smothers Brothers, among others, and directed the 1951 chimp comedy Bedtime for Bonzo, co-starring Ronald Reagan. A frequent target of Carson's on-air jokes, De Cordova called his job "the best in television...
...shambles. Ms. Musselwhite had assigned each group of fourth-graders the task of staging a mock debate and none of us would be Ronald Reagan. Most of us wanted to be John Anderson, a few kids said they guessed they'd play Carter but absolutely everyone refused to be Bonzo. Finally the nerdy boy who always reminded our teacher to collect the homework reluctantly volunteered to play Reagan...
George Bush--Bush should retire to a ranch in Grenada with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail S. Gorbachev. They can watch tapes of that invasion, the Gulf War, the Falklands, Afghanistan and, of course, nightly reprisals of "Bedtime for Bonzo...
...help answer the questions of our fate as citizens of a great republic and watchers of "Laverne and Shirley," Dewitt highly recommends Salvador (Somerville Theater). This tale of unethical U.S. involvement in Central America came out last year--in an era when "Bonzo" films ruled the land--and drew a very small though politically conscious audience. In fact, its only major run in Boston was at the Orson Welles Theater in Cambridge, an edifice that subsequently burned down, although Dewitt has it on good authority that the film exercised no jinxing effect in that accident...