Word: clown
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hunchback of Notre Dame, the organ-playing ghoul of The Phantom of the Opera, the sad clown in He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney proved the possibilities of escaping oneself. As an artist might rush to his easel to sketch the characters he had encountered in a day, Chaney would go home to his makeup kit and superimpose upon his own flesh the faces he had studied in police courts, water front dives and cafés. With putty and plaster, collodion-created scars, false teeth, wigs, facial clamps, cotton stuffing and rubber dilaters, Actor Chaney would be somebody else...
...more cheerfully in the Court of the Duke of Athens, with the antics of Peter Quince and his loutish crew. This scene invites overplaying, a sin the Players certainly avoid. Edgerton as Quince, Waldstein as Bottom, William Trebilcock as Flute, Harvey White as Wall, and Karl Cook as Snug clown without hamming. And Bruce MacDonald plays the magnanimous Duke with special ability...
...funny, but would be a great deal funnier if Newby had made the smile on the face of his souvenir sphinx a little more inscrutable. Missing is the magic touch of the old master, the young Evelyn Waugh, whose clown's bladder was deadly as a blackjack. Newby's hurts no one, not even the Egyptians...
...civic debt in Italian history ($160 million), giving his fellow townsmen spaghetti, circuses, repaved streets, and a first-class soccer team. (Mayor Lauro cheerfully forked over $200,000 to sign up one Swedish soccer star for Naples.) The Neapolitan crowds love him; opposition politicians consider him a gold-plated clown, or, in the words of one, stricken by "dynamic senility...
Laugh at the Laugh. When West first started to bat about with his phosgene-filled clown's bladder, he was an expatriate boulevardier in Paris, sporting umbrella and plaid overcoat among the beards and corduroy of the lost generation. The Dream Life of Balso Snell seems on the surface like one of those near-sophomoric, painfully private japes played for the semiprivate public of a little magazine. It concerns the dream adventures of Balso Snell, a poet, who enters a Trojan Horse from the rear end ("Anus Mirabilis!"), and encounters a number of symbolic characters in the murky interior...