Word: chaplinitis
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Sellers occasionally evokes vague memories of Chaplin and a promising young screen comedian named Peter Sellers who was awfully funny in some low-budget British farces. Early on in his career, he proved he could play a U.N.'s worth of accents and roles. Lately, however, his roles have been playing him, a familiar figure afflicted by gigantosis of the production and paralysis of the talent. Unlike his black-and-white delights of the '50s, this Technicolor collage substitutes fake eccentricity for true humor. One man wears a toupee that looks like melted LPs, another drinks nothing...
Monday, September 25 THE DANNY THOMAS HOUR (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Geraldine Chaplin, Robert Stack and Michael J. Pollard make "The Scene" in a hippie-v. square-generation drama involving acid and psychedelia...
...still more talked-about revival is Lillian Hellman's 1939 The Little Foxes, with Mike Nichols directing a company comprising Anne Bancroft, Margaret Leighton, George C. Scott, E. G. Marshall and Geraldine Chaplin. Not least of the season's curiosities: Soviet Playwright Aleksie Arbuzov's The Promise, the first postwar Russian work to play Broadway. Directed by Britain's Frank Hauser, it is a romance about life and love in Leningrad...
Sellers, the Melancholy Matador, sometimes gets a laugh. But after he loses the girl, he bumps gracelessly from parody into pathos. Sellers just doesn't belong to the Chaplin tradition. He's a fraudulent character like Groucho Marx, who brings a leer into every tearjerker moment. When the trickster look falls off Sellers' face, he's cooked...
...cast of characters begins in 1923 with Charlie Chaplin and Warren G. Harding, and marches on in these four issues through years in which the figures on center stage range from Herbert Hoover to Booth Tarkington to Clara Bow, from Joe Louis to Adolf Hitler to Virginia Woolf, from Douglas MacArthur to Joe McCarthy to George Orwell. Each issue becomes a history of its year, not only tracing the overriding central themes - the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War - but also providing vignettes that help bring people alive...