Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Favorite Spy (Paramount) casts Bob Hope as both a cowardly burlesque comedian and a debonair international spy.^ U.S. security agents persuade the comic to impersonate the spy, pack him off to a Tangier that is teeming with sinister villains (Francis L. Sullivan & Co.) and baited with a beautiful but treacherous lady spy (Hedy Lamarr...
...merely hopeful; he has used most of the situations himself many times before, and even the title owes a debt to one of his earlier films, 1942's My Favorite Blonde. But for all these heavy mortgages, Hope and his five writers pay a good rate of comic interest: rapid-fire gags, uproarious burleyque bits such as those that enrich Broadway's current Top Banana, and an oldfashioned, helter-skelter movie chase in which Hedy drives a fire truck through old Tangier with Hope perilously clinging to its raised ladder...
...turns incongruously into a sentimental old dear, Clifton (Belvedere) Webb takes another sizable stride in his descent from actor to movie type. Elopement contains one passably good visual gag: a modern reclining chair that slowly tips its occupant upside down. But the film is so hard up for comic ideas that it has to use the same gag twice...
Ever since Cartoonist George Herriman died in 1944, and Krazy Kat disappeared from the back fence of literature, the comic strips have suffered an intellectual hiatus. One syndicate was ready with Barnaby, a cheerful little psycho whose daydreams, and all the characters in them, came to life; but where Krazy Kat breathed a sort of smoky, city poetry that anyone could sniff, Barnaby and his friends mumbled social parables that a lot of well-wishers soon wearied of puzzling...
...newest comic-strip character with intellectual appeal is a possum called Pogo. Born three years ago in the moribund New York Star* Pogo has multiplied himself with possumly precocity, and currently appears in 210 U.S. newspapers. Cartoonist Walt Kelly has now collected the best-known adventures of Pogo into a book which all but filled Santa's pouch with little marsupials. In fact, during the month of December, Pogo has been the fastest-selling book...