Word: chaplinitis
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Nothing, in short, about her prior career hinted that she could be as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin -- and more ladylike than Milton Berle. Along with the other foremost icon of the '50s Golden Age of TV, Jackie Gleason, Ball was a larger-than-life talent uniquely suited to the small screen. Her signature series, I Love Lucy, and its successors endured more than two decades in prime time, from 1951 to 1974, one of the few immutables in a sea of social change. Lucy, seen in more than...
...head a studio, Desilu Productions, Ball said she saw herself as "not an idea girl but a doer." Like the silent comedians she studied (Buster Keaton, her onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) took a job wrapping chocolates; as the candies hurtled past on a conveyor belt...
Lucille Ball was as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin -- and more ladylike than Milton Berle. In reruns, she is eternal...
...similar to the argument for free trade: once barriers to exchange go up, everyone loses. Some never experience Beethoven, some never experience Charlie Chaplin--and whether you think the trade-off is even or not, it's hard to see what's good about having any creative work rendered off-limits...
...Eddie's always had the power," says his friend Robert Townsend, "but now he's flexing his muscles more." And why not? Murphy, 27, may be the most popular movie comedian since Charlie Chaplin. Beverly Hills Cop ranks No. 9 among all-time box-office champs; Cop II was last summer's monster hit; Raw, released at Christmas, was the top-grossing concert film ever. Now Murphy has upended his strutting, misogynist image to play an innocent prince pursuing an independent woman. In Coming to America, Eddie is ready for love...