Word: caesares
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WEDNESDAY: Little Caesar. (1950). Horatio Alger story of the Syndicate with Edward G. Robinson as the rags-to-offers-you-can't-refuse hero...
...Caesar was like an unrefined piece of electronic equipment-a sensitive comic receptor who could be jolted into action by the slightest comic impulse. The impulses were provided by a crew of pleasantly deranged writers (Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen and the young Mel Brooks among them...
...Caesar was a big man, broad of feature and seemingly clumsy, and his face was unremarkable in repose. Of course, it was almost never in repose, but was forever melting, cracking or erupting into some expression of comic extremity. His body, too, was surprisingly lithe, as if his physical dexterity defied his size. Caesar's comedy was a wild assault, with nothing especially cunning about it. As carefully planned as it must have been, Caesar and his wonderfully talented cronies (Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris) always gave it that crucial feeling of spontaneity, a hint that somehow everything...
...Liebman, who produced Your Show of Shows, has compiled this film with a craftsman's eye for pacing the laughter. It begins slowly, with a modest bit of domestic conflict in which Imogene Coca, looking, as ever, like your high-school dietician, must tell Caesar, her husband, that she has wrecked his beloved car. From there the film builds rapidly to an unlikely skirmish in a movie theater, a board meeting presided over by a chairman concerned only with his lunch, and a fond parody of a silent film called The Sewing Machine Girl. Finally there...
...affable madness circulated on Your Show of Shows and its successor, Caesar's Hour, was contagious. Other Caesar writers at one time or another included Neil Simon and Woody Allen...