Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Noel Coward pours the froth of inflection as if it were the champagne of wit. He is a connoisseur of surfaces, a sealer of the comic Everests of trivia. His plays are echo chambers of his own voice. His cool, clipped speech serves as an ironically British parody of the stiff upper...
Many custard pies have been thrown in the face of the silent-movie business, but few as sour as The Comic. If its advertisements are to be believed, the movie is simply a fond lampoon of Hollywood's pride-and-pratfall epoch. As the film unreels, it becomes in fact a furious editorial about a business that treats its veterans like overexposed celluloid...
...Dyke), clicks in silent two-reelers and becomes a national figure. Producer-Director-Writer Carl Reiner gives Van Dyke almost enough of this plot line to hang himself by strutting and capering in the manner of Mack Sennett's mute screwballs. Such flickering shenanigans are the most comical part of The Comic, but they are also the most derivative. The film gains its validity and poignance when Billy Bright reaches a crossroads and veers to the wrong. Sound movies are bunk, he decides, and abruptly the humor fades to black...
...Comic is damaged by Sunday Supplement color and cutting that might have been done with garden shears. Perhaps as a consequence, Columbia Pictures decided to hold it at arm's length, a flop to be forgotten. A flop, perhaps. Forgotten, hardly. For The Comic contains the most ambitious performance of Van Dyke's career, a resolutely unglamorous close-up of a string-necked, right-wing Angeleno, faded by sun and circumstance...
...safe is it to let fascination guide one's education? Is "WOW" enough to make reading a sentence or seeing a picture valuable, if there is no "discipline" involved? Shall we let our children read the comic books of yester-year...