Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Thanks for the high-camp comic relief, "On Running New York" [Nov. 1]. The counterpoint of describing Lindsay laughing over a column on "pseudo intellectuals," and then having him quote Dickens and Yeats was inspired. For those of us who have heard hizzoner try to articulate without a script, this new-found eloquence came as a real surprise. Add a wife who sounds the dinner bell in French, sherry for lunch, and a picture of our boy John in tails at the Met, and you have the ingredients for a clever burlesque of J.F.K. and Jackie...
...Dishonesty also expressed itself in the left by a simultaneous clamor for a "strong line" against Hitler (read "war") and demands for peace and disarmament. The British intellectuals, wrote Orwell in August 1941, "for ten dreadful years have kept it up that Hitler is merely a figure out of comic opera. All this reflects is the sheltered condition of English life...
...there's anything I hate," the comic novelist Peter De Vries once observed, "it's that word humorist. I feel like countering with the word seriousist...
...confesses that he has slept with about 300 different women in the last six months. "My, you've been a busy little beaver," a detective quips. Not to be outdone, his sidekick adds, "Find out what diet he's on and have it mimeographed." DeSalvo himself becomes a deadpan comic--as deadpan as only Curtis can be. Posing as a plumber, he tells a victim that "you're on my list," to gain entrance into her apartment. And then, after his first on-screen assault begins, one can almost hear the cameraman calculating, "and ... now, di ... solve." Which he does...
...Once the comic opera and the skin scenes are out of the way, it's time to have the confrontation between DeSalvo and John Bottomley, the dogged law-professor-cum--special investigator, (Henry Fonda plus moustache) who has been commissioned to track the killer down. Aside from a brief interlude in which Bottomley confesses his secret worry--"I'm beginning to like this"--to his wife, the interrogation and, predictably and inevitably, the breakdown of DeSalvo takes place against a searingly white background. Once you've mulled for six or seven seconds over the symbolic significance of the white...