Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kevin Roller is a fat, lowborn lecher who has piled up a smelly fortune publishing obscene comic books and now has bought into the respectable but slipping Primrose Press. Is there a Kevin Roller on Manhattan's publishers' row? He is, at worst, a composite: traits of his career can be spotted in several existing New York publishing firms. Similarly, Tony Thompson-the passionate editor with a winetaster's nose for genius and a mixed-up love life-recalls bits and pieces of several real-life editors' personal histories. The same goes for Gerald Primrose...
...musical comedy Rumple is not really so absurd as its title would suggest. That title, it might be well to explain at the outset, is also the name of a newspaper comic strip character who, for some unclear reason, comes to life to haunt his creator. The fact that Rumple is invisible to everybody else in the cast provides Irving Phillips' book with its main source of humor. Though scarcely original, the joke is still intermittently funny...
...mold which has been a success as often as this one. The pattern of musical comedies is nearly always the same. After a fast opening chorus, the romantic male lead meets and wins the romantic female lead, all to the tune of a ballad. Then comes the comic subplot, generally introduced by means of a specialty number. After that, the plot takes over for a while, and by the time the first-act curtain falls, the lovers are parted. The second act, which also opens with a chorus number, is shorter and more sketchy than the first. All that...
...invents an indestructible and soil-proof fabric on the sly and manages to cause no small furor in the ranks of British industry and labor, as they try to suppress the invention, the first fearful of depleting the business, the second of losing their jobs. Under all the comic routine is couched quite a powerful satire of the illogical complexities of the modern economy, quite beyond the good will of the participants. Mr. Guiness is at at his very best, never overplaying but by quietly alternating shy smiles of joy and perplexity he manages to put each scene across with...
...characters are given fairly bright dialogue, and both their words and their action often openly satirize English customs. The whole film is one of Britain's better exercises in comic style, and for Sim himself, in his familiar genre, it is a tour de force...