Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When you saw Hulot's Holiday, you got belly-laughs from Tati's portrayal of the Hulot personality. The whole responsibility of making the situations comic was his. But when you see My Uncle, the comedian Tati is solidly supported by script-writer Tati, and expertly guided by the director, also Tati. This makes for more humor, and subtler, and for a more acceptable cinematic whole...
...Requiem proved to be a long, elaborately orchestrated work, so sprightly that it seemed better suited to a festival than a funeral. The choral parts suggest passion rather than piety; the orchestra skips and trips along with a fine comic invention. The work is at its most exuberant in the solo parts, which are as warmly melodic as the love songs of Italian street singers. Many an Italian requiem, including Verdi's, is shot through with operatic overtones, but Cimarosa's work verges on opera so closely that it requires only the substitution of a bedroom plot...
...true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts are leaden cannonballs. What alone and all too stridently emerges is O'Casey's angry protest. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, in any real sense, has still to be produced in New York...
Guinness, of course, is a howl; the wheezing, hawking, spitting image of a merry old soak. He sports a fortnight's grizzle, along with "eyes like a pair of half-sucked acid drops," and he has developed a horrendously comic walk. Yet he never lets the spectator forget that Jimson is a man of parts-though he never quite manages to convince anybody that the old rapscallion is really a genius. The stupefyingly loud and uninteresting pictures he paints (actually the work of Britain's 30-year-old John Bratby) are partly responsible for the failure, but Guinness...
Omnibus (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). The So-Called Human Race, a walleyed, satirical look at psychiatry by George Panetta, whose credentials include an off-Broadway comedy called Comic Strip that nail-tough Critic Walter Kerr dismissed as "perfect...