Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hard thing to live down, especially for a performer of 21. This amiable but unmemorable release-recorded live at Manhattan's Bitter End cafe -indicates that it may be some time before Guthrie matches Restaurant again. Meantime, his satire may not bite but it nips playfully, and his comic drawl is impeccably timed. The Pause of Mr. Claus begins with a monologue spoofing the FBI, launches into a song about how Santa Claus is suspect because of his red suit and long hair, ends with the refrain: "Why do police guys beat on peace guys...
...cellos as Cleopatra clasps the asp to her bosom. In Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz shows that he can be as tender with Shakespeare's young lovers as he is terrifying with Cleopatra. Berlioz did not, however, always have to rely on emotional pressure. The overture to the comic opera Beatrice and Benedict, which Davis played at his third concert last week, is a masterpiece of witty understatement that perfectly graces the champagne gaiety of the entire work...
...plays an upright, uptight Los Angeles lawyer named Harold Fine with a surfeit of standard comic woes: asthma, a meaningless job, a possessive fiancée, a Jewish mother. One sunny day a psychedelicate girl (Leigh Taylor-Young) bakes him a bunch of groovy brownies from an Alice B. Toklas Cook Book recipe that specifies a few pinches of hashish. Harold promptly blows his mind and his job, puts on a hippie face and runs off with the girl. But as his hair grows down to his shoulders his troubles run up to his ears. Mama kvetches on the phone...
Along the journey to nowhere, Sellers displays a few glimmers of the comic genius that once made him seem like a chip off the old Chaplin, notably in a hilarious Spanish-Yiddish-English brouhaha involving his mother and eleven Mexican whiplash-injury clients. But most of the time, the movie reduces him to elephantine gestures and TV-sized jokes. As he runs into the fadeout, a passing hippie asks him where he is going. "I don't know," Sellers answers. "There must be someplace." The line sums up both this meandering movie and the flickering career of a gifted...
...search of a visual mode for its subject, West German animator Heinz Edelmann furiously ransacks the past. From the mannerists, he borrows "shot colors" -red blending into orange, blue fading into green. He employs the whiplash and the curvilinear strokes of art nouveau. He features the upholstered monsters of comic strips, the impudent whimsy of Dada, the vibrating poster art of Peter Max. The eclecticism almost becomes a style of its own, and occasionally it is effective, as in Eleanor Rigby when "all the lonely people" appear as gritty newsreel figures who float by each other in a surrealistic frieze...