Word: chaplinitis
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...Faces of Love, the movie's demure title, is the brainchild of bored Boris Adrian, a film maker in the tradition of Chaplin and Fellini whose previous efforts have exhausted the topics of Death, Infinity and the origin of Time. "What I want to know," asks Boris, "is why are stag films always so ridiculous? Suppose the film were made under studio conditions - feature-length, color, beautiful actors, great lighting. How would it look then...
...possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American humorists, in other words, have kept American puritans sane and alive...
...Quackser was the idealization of everything I've wanted to do as an actor. He typifies where I'm at now-humorous, sexual, innocent and striving for simplicity." Wilder's delicate blend of humor and pathos makes the viewer think he is seeing young Charlie Chaplin with reddish hair and an Irish brogue. It also makes Quackser Fortune one of the most delightful comic dramas in recent years...
...plot is laced with the usual colonial tensions and pretensions: Hoxworth feuds with a polyglut of races while his pineapple princess (Geraldine Chaplin) goes quietly mad. Every time the pace slackens, which is often, someone goes to sea, either to pick up field hands or to transport lepers to Molokai. The incessant ebb and flow is intended as a metaphor for the turbulent tides of Hawaiian life. But the real metaphor here is the pineapple, which in the good old gangster days was a synonym for bomb...
There are also some film programs sponsored by Harvard. Ivy Films, at Carpenter Center, will show movies by directors like Chaplin, yon Stroheim, and Rossellini at 7 and 9 p. m. on Thursdays during the Summer term. Film Studies is doing a series on great American directors, also at Carpenter Center, at 7 p. m. on Sundays. And there will be a series of classic films shown at Emerson 105 at 7 p. m. on Fridays...