Word: chimp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact, the first thing a viewer of the new film has to do is take a machete to his comfortable expectations about the Ape Man. Banish beefy Johnny Weissmuller, his predecessors and his heirs from your mind; rethink Jane; forget Boy; above all, abandon hope that Cheeta the chimp will skitter on to provide not only the movie's best acting but its only conscious comic relief as well. All of that was admittedly fun, as if the cast of a suburban sitcom had been dropped down in the African hinterlands, told to undress and act natural. But Burroughs...
...Tony Award; by his own hand (he shot himself); in Flower Hill, N.Y. His most memorable film role was that of the deceitful U-boat captain in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), but he may be better known today as Ronald Reagan's co-star-with a chimp-in the 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo...
...Cohn's companion on his frail ark: a talking chimpanzee named Buz, after "one of the descendants of Nahor, the brother of Abraham the Patriarch." Granted that Cohn, a former rabbinical student, is given to excesses in biblical name giving, his choice of Buz is scarcely apposite; the chimp is a Christian convert who crosses himself when Cohn reads to him from the Book of Genesis...
Somewhere in this jungle fantasy is no doubt concealed an allegory of the Jews' well-known didacticism and their penchant for social justice. More obscure is the significance of Cohn's coupling with Mary Madelyn (the chimp pronunciation of Mary Magdalene), the island's unique female, a chimp who quotes from Romeo and Juliet with a lisp ("What wov can do, that dares wov attempt"). The fact that only Cohn and Mary Madelyn have sex, producing a baby, causes the beasts to go amuck. In a lunatic re-enactment of both Abraham's intended sacrifice...
...raising dinner in Los Angeles, the President got a partisan laugh by joking, "Believe me, Bedtime for Bonzo made more sense than what they were doing in Washington." The reference, of course, was to a 1951 movie in which Ronald Reagan played a professor who tried to educate a chimp. The wisecrack was part of an attack on congressional Democrats, and as such was a bit unfair since Reagan is partly to blame for the present budget confusion. Back in February, he offered Congress a budget containing increases in military spending so large, cuts in social outlays so drastic...