Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...were reared with rubber nipples and talcum powder to an apron-strung neurosis. Homosexuality (8,000,000 in the U.S. at last estimate) went on the upswing--Dad had the only woman worth wanting. And Father became the fall-guy for every situation comedy and Sunday color comic--the benign, well - meaning, oft - stumbling, ever - bungling apex of the Oedipus triangle...
This method of building the commercial into the drama is the most distinctive feature of television in Japan, a nation rapidly becoming as TV-obsessed as the U.S. In a soap opera, A Comic Housemaid, the heroine habitually complains of a racking headache in midscene, gulps down an Arakawa Drug Co. remedy and announces: "Now I'm ready for anything." One private eye uses a drugstore as rendezvous-a drugstore whose shelves are conspicuously filled with the sponsor's patent medicines. In another samurai episode, the hero vanquished a batch of evildoers, then warily approached a wayside shrine...
Finding the man to play Harold Hill was a more complicated problem. Television Comic Milton Berle wanted the part. TV Actor Art Carney was considered, and so was Dancer Ray Bolger. Da Costa had seen Robert Preston in a few summer stock shows; Bloomgarden, too, knew Preston's work. Says Da Costa: "Preston has energy and he has reality. He's an actor who can project himself larger than life. And he has enough sureness of technique and enough urbanity to portray the con man and the opportunist without resorting to a wax mustache. The part calls...
Gruesome in spirit, comic in detail, this triangle is doomed to ruin by Joe Morgan's philosophical code. He is stuck with the arid belief that his "values" are valuable simply because he believes in them, while his mad friend does not care what values he upholds; in fact, he has none. Joe talks everyone to death in the interests of honesty, and the spirit of togetherness is symbolized by the fact that husband and lover are made aware that they both use the same brand of contraceptive...
...rather flat role of Happy, Robert Blackwell seems ill-at-ease at moments and rarely does his characterization catch fire. The role of Charley, the nextdoor neighbor, is carried by John Coe with a sure touch and necessary comic relief. However, he rushes through the beautiful and poignant requiem quite wastefully and thus loses some of the cathartic effect of the play...