Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WORLD TREATING YOU? manages to be blisteringly funny in the modern British fashion as it peppers hypocrisy, respectability, caste and class snobbery and native Blimpcompoops. Two insuperable zanies, Peter Bayliss and Patricia Routledge, volley comic antics back and forth with the precision of a finals match at Wimbledon...
Miss Feltenstein is powerful in the dramatic scenes as the indomitable mother-figure part of the eternal feminine. But it is her voice that commands. Her motions are stiff and awkward in key scenes. Nightingale who outfits a comic chorus with amazing props and movements (they make marvelous animals going into the Ark), seems to have directed disembodied voices in the serious scenes. Even Beck, the company's most polished performer, often appears unsure of what to do with his hands at dramatic moments. The power of the scenes, especially the ends of the three acts, is undercut...
...notice that the peanuts are missing at the officers' bar, and he raises unprintable hell. World regularly mocks British dead-face understatement about things that count v. British redneck rage over trifles. Bayliss does a kind of tonsillectomy of his part. He wheezes, bleeps, snorts, and plays endless comic tunes on his catarrh. He is like an animated poster propagandizing the inanity, silliness and stupidity of the military...
...scouts out a now-stout married member of Hadassah and begs her to let him view again a most intimate mole, in hopes of recovering the lost ecstasy of that first exposure to sexuality. What is ludicrous about this effaces what is poignant. The third and most effectively comic playlet, Orange Soufflé pits a "Polack whore" against her monthly client, an 88-year-old tycoon: she is hurt that he fails to recognize her social graces...
...down comedian, sitting in a wheelchair that makes him seem foolish but never funny. With Lemmon immobilized, only a miracle could save the show from being as sedative as Wilder's last picture, Kiss Me, Stupid. Fortunately, something like a miracle is at hand: Walter Matthau. A magnificent comic actor too long misused as a minor cinemenace, Matthau last year played such a spectacular slob in The Odd Couple that he made himself a major star of the U.S. stage. As the icing on Wilder's Cookie, he should also be accepted as one of cinema...