Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
From a distance, the current Greek government looks like a comic farce. The ruling colonels are a parody of the modern military regime: right-wing officers bow out to reactionaries; one purge succeeds another until there remains only a core of deeply paranoic rulers with a dramatic flair for secret police and censorship. Combining the absurd and the petty, the Greek colonels prohibit political talk in private homes, and deprive Melina Mercouri of her citizenship. Puritanical instincts have prompted them to ban mini-skirts, long hair, classical Greek plays, and to declare compulsory church attendance...
...diver, or so he thinks. Harold, in a skull-popping panic, half-dials phones, swigs champagne from a bottle, runs to the door with his scythe and roars out bloody maledictions on "the Goddamn spade frogman." In a performance marvelously sustained at the pitch of brilliance, Jerry Orbach sprays comic vitriol without ever letting the playgoer forget that this man's heart is in a vise of anguish...
Recently, comic westerns have assumed that Cat Ballon had nine lives. Waterhole #3 offers ample evidence that it did not. This latest imitative incarnation lacks Lee Marvin and much else besides. An arguably lovable villain (James Coburn) plugs an enemy with a long-distance rifle, then takes from the corpse a map indicating a cache of glommed Government gold. Before setting out on the treasure hunt, he finds time to rape the local sheriff's daughter. When confronted by the indignant father, he claims roguishly that the murder was self-defense, the rape merely "assault with a friendly weapon...
...proved with the Flint films, Coburn can cut a wide peel from some mighty small potatoes. But this enterprise makes him seem less a star than a character actor who needs smaller roles in order to regain his comic stature. In part, the blame may lie with a bland, spiritless script that fancies itself original in lampooning western cliches, yet has the temerity to steal Jack Benny's most famous joke: "Your money or your life." Pause. "Well?" "I'm thinking." Theft and rape may sometimes be forgivable; plagiarism never...