Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dramatic movement on the stage. In the City Center production, Stage Director Vladimir Rosing and Designer H. A. Condell had succeeded in getting up some colorful pageantry; three Gilbert & Sullivan types named Ping, Pang anu Pong, the emperor's ministers, did their best to give the opera some comic relief; and Soprano Martinis sang her stony and stolid role with a voice that was as strong, hard and cold as a wire cable. The chill was hardly her fault: singing her first Turandot, she found the part "so cold-really musicless...
Using few titles, Chaplin tells the simple, ironic story with expert pantomime, fills it out with no end of comic invention. In his nightclubbing adventures with the millionaire, he never gives the audience a chance to stop laughing. He leaps gallantly to the defense of the abused lady in an apache dance team; he munches steadily ceilingward on a string of confetti that gets snarled in his spaghetti; he tries repeatedly to light his cigar but succeeds only in lighting the cigar that the millionaire is waving airily before his face. In another sequence, beautifully timed and sustained, he turns...
...Police Gazette reporter. Eddle Albert, as Horace Miller, though not outstanding in general, sings "A Little Fish in a Big Pond" with a fine hoarse staccato. Patricia Hammerlee, the female lead in the ballet troupe, steals nearly every dancing scene with an unusual mastery of comic ballet; the brightest spot in the first act is her routine in the Paris park scene...
...Clifton Webb, Gilbreth is by means as appropriate a part as Belvedere was. Gilbreth, by nature, has certain "lovable" qualities--devotion to his family, generosity--that require of the actor as much folksy as comic skill. More than that, the comedy in Webb's previous assignments was in the person of Belvedere. But "Cheaper by the Dozen" is much more of a situational comedy, where the large family and the antiquated automobile set up the gags. Webb on the whole has far less chance to display his skill as a comedian...
Westerns and movie magazines in Cahaly's don't find a college audience, though "some of the professors like comic books." Walt Disney is popular with both students and faculty. And a few men, it seems, are struggling through Humanities 2 with the aid of Classic Comics...