Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...disturbs the Western consciousness. He is a figure of mythic proportions, larger than the countless works of art that have tried to contain him, from Moliere and Goldoni through Byron and Shaw. The fascination of his enigmatic psychology is apparently inexhaustible. He has been seen as a Punch-like comic character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation of the greatest of all Don Juan stories and perhaps the greatest of all operas, Mozart...
...dead, having bequeathed all to the Brauns. Herman has been home for a day and they are preparing to make love. "I gave you everything," Maria tells Herman. "My whole life. Got a match?" Mistakenly, she left the gas on. Boom. Both go up in flames, a tragi-comic resolution to the whole affair. After evincing such uncanny survival skills, Maria Braun is undone by a measly cigarette. In the background Fassbinder adds the last little fillip of irony: we hear over the radio that Germany has just won the World Soccer Championships...
DIED. Al Capp, 70, sardonic cartoonist who gained fame and wealth with his Li'l Abner comic strip; in Cambridge, Mass, (see PRESS...
...Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge portion of the leviathan and a Platonic affair with Sarah, daughter of Tovim...
None of this works. Kane talks through her nose, and Beckley overacts. Dewhurst is physically far more formidable than her assailant and so does not seem menaced. Durning, a mild fat man who was perfectly cast as the comic villain in The Muppet Movie, jiggles too much when he runs to be credible as an implacable avenger. Moss grew years ago on Director Fred Walton's spooky trips...