Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Simckes creates some fine comic scenes, the funnist of them in a scatalogical vein. Who can forget-Mrs. Charpolsky stuffing the toilet to block off the cold draught and hanging desperately over the bowl in her effort to remain untouched by the seat? Or Ma Shemansky's shame and indignation when she hears Fievet declare, not the expected I have to make pippy or trickle or ich darj ghen pishen, but the treasonable, "I want to urinate...
Though his book is wildly comic, Simckes also means to be profound. Gleich's humanizing influence on the son, Barish, is subtle and significant, awakening in the previously uncommitted and detached narrator pity--even for the most twisted form of life. Simckes also suggests the crucial necessity of ritual and law in giving life dignity. Such lessons are well taken but, I'm afraid, seem contrived; Gleich is too much the deus ex machine. He appears abruptly, expounds Simckes' orthodox panacea, and departs suddenly. The Shemanskys are too incredible. From the first page, they are fantastic, insufferable, sick...
...lady and her maid, the U.S. Senator as well as the unknown worker in Washington's vast army of civil servants. While he lived, Washington Post Publisher Philip Graham liked to describe the Post as "an egalitarian paper." The description fits. The Post says that it carries more comic strips than any other newspaper in the U.S., but for Washington officialdom, the Post also runs the most carefully wrought-and the most widely read-editorials in the nation's capital. In all branches and at all levels of Government, it is regarded as compulsory reading; one Post survey...
...podge of Don Quixote and La Dolce Vita, a Tom Jones with jetaway. Gassman is superbly absurd as a sex bomb stuffed with ravioli, and Director Dino Risi faultlessly paces and spaces the fun and games. In its whole intention, however, The Easy Life is clearly more tragic than comic. The party is over before the picture is over. The spectator lifts the last glass of champagne to his lips and finds it full of blood: the blood of a decent, bewildered boy who does not understand that every man must live his own life, no matter how dull...
...watchword of the production, and director David Mills sacrifices all else to the goal of recreating the melodrama just as it was performed in the 1830s. Stylized acting, with standard gestures, asides, appeals to heaven, and so on can be entertaining if thrown into a performance as comic relief. A full play of it tends to alienate even the most hardened of audiences...