Word: clown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...started a clown college to train replacements for Ringling's creaky old comic crew (average age: 66). And he changed what he calls "the Las Vegas look" of the circus-a polite way of saying that he hired showgirls who did not look quite so shopworn...
Says Constantine of his role: "There came a point where I refused to do another joke because I felt my character was being written like a clown. One week I came very close to asking to be let out of the entire series because there had been a couple of weeks like that." Hence, there are seemingly endless bull sessions between cast and producer to work out better dialogue and clearer confrontations between characters. One day Haynes vehemently announced: "These scenes are so far away from reality! There's no attempt to get any sort of realism...
Fellini calls his Satyricon a "science-fiction trip into the past instead of the future." It blasts off with a scene so brilliant that the whole picture shivers from the thrust. In a masque, a musically flatulent clown capers on a stage, mocking the audience with scatological jokes and gestures. A grinning idiot is carried onstage and led to a chopping block. A headsman mimes a blow with his weapon -then chops the victim's hand off to a chorus of cackles, while freshets of blood stain the scene. It is a savage fragment of the cinema of cruelty...
...perverse characters and grotesque objects of Chabrol's earlier films take a part in La Femme Infidele. The taller of the two anarchic clowns, whom he has repeatedly employed, turns up unshaven in a bar and insults the protagonist as he passes through. The shorter one appears as a truck driver who rams the rear of the hero's car at a crucial moment. But like the extravagant colors and camera motions that La Femme Infidele inherits from the earlier films, these characters have become precisely integrated and thereby far deeper in emotional effect. The boorishness of the second clown...
...both. "I may have been reared strangely compared with other kids, but I had a swell time growing up. Really." Childhood was visiting movie sets where Judy was filming or where Liza's father, Vincente Minnelli, was directing. It was enormous birthday parties, "all with the same hired clown." It was on the set watching Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing, being spoiled by Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker while visiting her father on location, being fascinated not one whit by her mother's talent because, after all, "she sang all the time at home...