Word: chipmunk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that he shares with Alma, his wife for 38 years. They find a slightly stooped, nearly bald host with fine, parchment-like skin and strikingly pale blue eyes. He looks frail until he talks or moves, scuttling be tween sofa, telephone and front door with the vitality of a chipmunk...
Harry Dorfman as Arnold Burns and Kipp Rogers as Chuckles the Chipmunk, Murray's boss, also measure up to the rest of the cast. Dorfman competently fills the role of Murray's serious brother who compromised long ago and endures Murray's scorn with dignity. Rogers is fittingly unbearable as the pitifully unfunny Chuckles...
...Hogg can avoid doing penance for his selection of the cast; it's an all-star line-up. Jackson perfects a controlled deadpan; she achieves the Nixon scowl without the jowl. As a John Dean-like scapegoat, Sandy Dennis physically resembles a cross between the bespectacled Dean and a chipmunk in desperate need of orthodontic work. Mentally, she comes closer to a rodent in a behaviorist experiment as she blindly obeys Jackson's commands. Dennis impersonates Dean's monotone well, but her lines lack the variety to make her part interesting rather than grating...
Except for the rare and freakish abnormality, nature never violates the integrity of its forms. One cannot imagine, for example, nature grafting a giraffe's neck onto the body of a hippopotamus and topping it off with a chipmunk's head. Yet man, the born tinkerer, is forever fashioning hybrids out of his art forms. With reckless profusion, novels are turned into plays, plays into musicals, musicals into movies and vice versa. This is partly a matter of crass commerce, partly of dried-up imagination, and partly of pure madness...
...FOUR CHARACTERS are just as assured. Susan Ehrlich's Sandra is an appropriate mixture of the fun-loving and the affably neurotic; Joe Mobilia's Arnold--the social worker with his heart in his glasses--is perfect; and David Goldbloom, as Leo Herman, plays what amounts to a certifiable chipmunk with energy and a brilliant voice. Ira Fink's picture of Murray's brother bears an uncanny resemblance to Dick Van Dyke, and is probably better at hamming...