Word: casanova
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...English language (above, dove, glove, shove). But while he can be shamelessly obvious, more often Porter is so dazzlingly dexterous that all the Tin Pan Alleycats bristle with awe. Nobody is cozier with words: for him, Winchell rhymes with provincial, suburban with Deanna Durbin, Nina with schizophrenia. Jehovah with Casanova, Lassie with democrassy, to the bottom I with hippopotami, a fine finnan haddie with my heart belongs to daddy, and Venetia who loved to chat so is still drinkin' in her stinkin' pink palazzo. There are images and characters in Porter that stick in the mind because...
...Casanova's Big Night (Paramount). "I'll scream for help," the lady protests, and no wonder. The Technicolored thing that has just waddled into her boudoir looks something like Louis XIV converted into a floor lamp. It turns out to be Bob Hope, cast as a sort of tailor's dummy who wishes he were man enough to fill Casanova's britches. And to the lady Hope replies (in a long, low-slung, sports-model voice that slides up to the listener's mental curb and honks suggestively): "I don't need any help...
...screen, more by what he says than in what he does. Give him a good line and he can throw it away with the electric unconcern of a stripper discarding the semifinal spangle, but it is not much fun when there is nothing in the line worth noticing. Typical Casanova gag line: ''Women are like oranges. When you've squeezed one. you've squeezed them...
Knock on Wood (Paramount), like Casanova, fails to fit a famous odd peg into the rectangular hole of the screen, but it is a much more entertaining try. The trouble with Danny Kaye as a movie comedian is that his humor is almost too graphic to photograph. Give him the wide-open spaces of a theater stage and like the prairie flower, he keeps growing wilder every hour. But confine him to the camera's cold, Technicolored eye and take away the living audience that gives him his reason for spreeing. and Kaye is not much better than...
Robert Burns followed his regimen so strenuously that at his death in 1796, he was known not only as Caledonia's bard but as the Scottish Casanova. Popular legend made him a victim of wine, women and song. Less censorious, and more in accord with modern views, Byron saw Burns forever riding the pendulum of a split personality: "Sentiment, sensuality, soaring and groveling, dirt and deity." Some of the best evidence for and against Burns the man-his robust, personable letters-has been sifted for the first time in two decades by a Brooklyn College English professor, DeLancey Ferguson...