Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...longer the private preserve of the art houses but a characteristic of the main-line American movie. Two for the Road, otherwise an ordinary Audrey Hepburn vehicle, has as much back-and-forth juggling of chronology as any film made by Alain Resnais-not to mention a comic acidity about marital discord that is as candid as anything the Swedes have said. Even a conspicuous failure such as John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye bleeds color images through black-and-white in a startling extension of the camera's palette. U.S. movies are now treating once...
...flawless supporting cast, Hattie McDaniel as Mammy gives a performance of star quality. Although a master of comic technique, she never sacrifices her role to the easy laugh; the development of her character through the years is the rock on which Gone With the Wind is built. Indeed, all the Negroes (even Butterfly McQueen, with the immortal "Lawsy, Miz Scahlet, Ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!") are so carefully individualized as characters that it is absurd to label them stereotypes or criticize the film for racial naivete...
...remarkably vivid. The Prince gave him a crack orchestra, and Haydn taught it a dramatic musical vocabulary unknown before his time. When it pleased him, he would begin a symphony (Nos. 22, 49) with a long slow movement instead of the expected brilliant allegro. Some of his effects were comic: in the finale of Symphony No. 60, the violins are asked to mistune their lowest string from G down to F, then pause in mock horror and raucously retune. At the end of Symphony No. 80, the orchestra comes in on the offbeat so consistently that wrong begins to sound...
Musically, one performance is a knockout. Shannon Scarry, as a gangster's moll hasn't got a great deal of voice, but she uses her limitations to good comic effect when she sings, and when she dances she doesn't have any limitations. There's also one solid comic performance, by Richard Rockefeller, who plays the broad Englishman like he should never play anything else...
...jokes in Falstaff are foolproof because Verdi built the comic timing into the music. If the singers stick to the notes, they can't help but deliver the punchline faultlessly every time. Add to this the fact that any joke, no matter how hackneyed, quadruples in laugh-value the moment it is set to music, and you see why the opera Falstaff is as much funner than the play The Merry Wives of Windsor as Gilbert and Sullivan is funnier than Gilbert...