Word: carneys
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...Late Show represents by far the most intelligent and engaging attempt at reincarnation so far. Writer-Director Benton (coauthor of the script for Bonnie and Clyde) has imagined a Philip Marlowe type named Ira Wells (Art Carney), who has outlived his day. He is discovered existing in a rented room on Social Security, watching old movies on TV while his attempt at an autobiography languishes in the typewriter, just one paragraph written. Then his old partner (played by Howard Duff, who was Sam Spade on the radio in the old days) arrives gut-shot at his door, dies...
This is all good fun, with plenty of smart cross talk and enough twists in the plot and situations to occupy even those unafflicted with nostalgia. What lifts the movie out of the curiosity category, however, is the performances of Carney and Tomlin...
Laid-Back Lives. With his dark suits and white shirts, Carney's character could not be more conspicuously out of place in modern Los Angeles. Then there is the glaring contrast between his tough, rational practicality of mind and the laid-back characters he keeps en countering. How, one wonders, will this cultural laggard cope with them? And even if he catches their drift, what if they get tough with him? He suggests a physical fragility that may not permit him to put enough muscle behind his hard-working mouth. There's good suspense here, the kind that...
...slow, believable way she al lows Carney's realism, his low-keyed contempt for such nonsense, to win her over. It may be a trifle too much for the film to suggest at the end the blooming of, as we now say, "a relationship" be tween them. Spade or Marlowe would have let her go. It may be that Benton is occasionally a trifle too aware of his own cleverness. On the other hand, he has made a first-class entertainment out of material that has defied other modernizers...
...carry off the prized statuette in his teeth. His teeth? Well, at least that's the way it happens in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood. The film, a spoof of the movie business in the 1920s, features Madeline Kahn as WTT's trainer, Art Carney as a tyrannical studio director-plus cameo appearances by Victor Mature, Rhonda Fleming and some 60 Hollywood veterans. No matter that Won Ton Ton bears a striking resemblance to another German shepherd screen star of the same era. A Los Angeles judge has already decided against a producer...