Word: brooksian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film does gently remind us of past pleasures, now missed, and it is rather handsomely produced. Maybe, since its creators lack a true-that is to say Mel Brooksian-gift for parody, they would have done better to play the whole thing straight and let us have our nostalgia unalloyed...
British Writer David Irving participates in the Hitler revisionism, though in a subtler fashion. His peculiar book, indefatigably researched for ten years and written to the size of a small footlocker, begins with a vaguely Brooksian premise: Hitler was "an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with graying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments.'' He was not, Irving continues, the lone maniac exclusively responsible for bringing down European civilization in Götterdämmerung. This singular chronicle of World War II displays a quiet and sometimes fascinating empathy for its subject, viewing...
Brooks' different routines all fall into a coherent pattern. Each of the characters he assumes is a charlatan, a famous "celebrity" whose every move is dishonest and phony. Yet there is honesty in the dishonesty. The roles are forced on the Brooksian characters by their society; inevitably the "celebrities" haplessly reveal the hollow core beneath their moral and cultural pretensions. Their dogged ineptitude at falsifying themselves arouses our compassion rather than our distaste...