Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...college town, who today outdraws Dr. Strangelove, outclocks Gone With the Wind, and breaks all known records for popcorn sales? It's not a bird or a plane but, of all things, Batman. The 1939 comic-strip creation of Bob Kane, which Columbia Pictures filmed in 1943 as a 15-episode serial, has now been spliced, end to end, to produce a 248-minute marathon of fist fights, zombies and ravenous alligators. Last week it was packing the house at an off-campus theater near the University of Illinois, and Columbia plans similar orgies in 20 major cities...
...kiddie movie was complete with out a Batman-and-Robin episode. Children roared their approval as the "dynamic duo" burst through windows, grappled with thugs and wrestled with wild animals in their lengthy pursuit of the evil Japanese Dr. Daka. Batman fell into cinematic and literary obscurity during the comic-book cleanup of the '50s (in 1954 Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham compared the relationship of Batman and Robin to "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together"). But in the Great Society, everyone lives better, and Batman and Robin have recently been rehabilitated into high-camp folk heroes...
Their puffy, unathletic leaps are a satire of comic-book prowess, and the plots are at the same level. Why should Batman's badly produced, amateurishly acted one-reelers do so well 22 years after they were released? Offered one Columbia executive: "Comic-book heroes are the only heroes we have nowadays." Said one Batfan: "It's pop art." Says another: "Where else can you get entertained for four hours for a buck and a quarter...
...least makes watching the play tolerable. But he can't supply suspense and emotion where they don't exist. His actors read the overly precious lines as realistically as possible, and the humorous scenes are more successful than the painfully low high drama. Paul Benedict, with a comic deadpan, plays the resistance fighter husband of a wife from a crumbling aristocratic background. He's terribly funny but not strong enough to make his convictions plausible. Lisa Richards as his wife does an outstanding job with a whining, pathetic character...
...COUPLE. The comic insight of Playwright Neil Simon gives hilarious credibility to a household of two husbands who find out-by living together-why their wives couldn't stand to live with them...