Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...film has an enormous virtue that too few comic films share: it takes itself lightly, playing with exaggeration and outrageousness, purposely stretching our ideas of reality and probability. It creates a mood within which we can laugh easily at a man whose commendable but legally dubious hobby is building bombs to explode pompous bores. Instead of being told, "This is reality," (which might be mildly grim, we are in effect told, "This is a caricature of reality...
...bottle, the script continues, rose a genial genie who was carried to fame on an alcoholocaust of humor. ("I only drink to steady my nerves. And sometimes I get so steady I can't move.") He has long been known as "the comic's comic"a polite way of saying that he has never been widely popular with the public-and as a famous heckler-heckler. ("Come down to the pool in the morning, and I'll give you lessons in drowning...
...cars where the others are scarcely capable of filching a loaf of bread from an untended grocery. He takes women and abandons them, wrecks Cadillacs for the hell of it. deserts his friends. He talks a blue streak in a syntax-free jumble of metaphysics, hipster jargon, quotations from comic strips and animal gruntings. Describing the skills of a hot saxophonist. Dean cries: "Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah...
...more than the Des Moines Tribune could stand. The paper (circ. 136,455) stiffly informed readers last week that it was discontinuing the current Mary Worth sequence because it was a "thinly disguised attack on the creator of another comic strip." Huffed a special announcement: "The editors of the Tribune believe that readers want to be entertained by comic strips and are not interested in the jealousies and rivalries that exist between comic strip creators...
...country there are really several worlds," says Author André Dhôtel at the outset of this wistful, wonderfully comic tale. His young hero, Gaspard Fontarelle, is born to a resolutely matter-of-fact world, the sleepy, stodgy French resort village of Lominval. But all about Lominval, as the young boy grows up, is the dark, beckoning world of the Ardennes forest. And Gaspard himself is marked from birth as another-worldling. At his christening, thunder rumbles in the distance, and a panicked cat scratches the notary's wife. Calamities hound the sweet, shy child-a deer hunter...