Word: comical
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Author Sidney Perelman, sometime cartoonist, funnyman and scenarist for the Marx Brothers, is famed for his comic writing in which clichés, puns, misunderstandings, paraphrases of oldtime cinema captions, tall talk and dull talk are jumbled together. But All Good Americans, a naturalistic play on hardboiled lovers, is not improved by being peppered with Perelman jokes, new, old, sometimes funny. The lines and action are sophisticated, superficial, curiously unreal...
...Editor Barden intended impolitely to bracket rich, potent Individualist Robert Rutherford McCormick with his newspaper's most famed comic strip character, "Andy Gump...
Produced last winter as a play, Christopher Bean emerges in the cinema only mildly impaired by scenes such as a wild ride in a dilapidated Ford and a preposterous interlude in a Pullman car, inserted to give Marie Dressier a chance to execute her comic chompings, blinkings and shoulder twitchings. Good shot: Beulah Bondi, when she wants him to cheat their old servant, urging Lionel Barrymore to think with his eyes closed...
...humor which characterizes most of the comic dialogue in the play is, like the title, forced and manifestly uninspired. But not all the lines fall short. The Plymouth audience did not hesitate to show appreciation when Hope Williams, on dismissing her over-formalized Rising Young Business Man suitor (Coburn Goodwin), asked him as a last favor to "goose Mrs. Cruikshank...
...repertory of grisly plays by Gorki, Chekhov and Strindberg. Thus Author Robinson has for his butts both the childish townspeople, who believe what they see on the stage, and the second-rate actors who lay open the dark places of the soul. In addition to these standard comic themes, he has tried to cash in on the superstition that anything said in Irish dialect is funny or fey, by making his scene the Irish town of Inish. But most of the cast have remarkably unfunny Irish accents, though their names are Irish. And Celt Robinson's lines have little...