Word: comical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Buster Keaton's comic mask was nearly indistinguishable from the one most actors don for tragedy. To have seen a Keaton film is to remember his thin, straight mouth, its corners barely holding their own against gravity. The eyes are equally memorable; Spanish Poet Federico García Lorca described them as "sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden." No matter what madness swirled around them, they remained wells of loneliness in the pale landscape of Keaton's face...
This school of hard knocks made Keaton a superb physical comic. It also drove him inward, to a place where neither friends, wives nor biographers could succeed in following. He was a passive, gentle, largely inarticulate man. His Hollywood career flourished as long as he had a producer, Joseph M. Schenk, who gave him independence and financial protection. Under such conditions, Keaton made at least two films, The Navigator and The General, that are unquestioned classics of the silent era. Unfortunately, Keaton's comedies did not show the profits of Chaplin's or of Harold Lloyd...
Still, Alda has an instinct for intelligent comic dialogue, a willingness to engage hard issues and a sure touch for creating characters of all ages and genders. Better a jerry-built movie about solid people than the reverse...
...antic and touching moments. For once, a movie love triangle features two strong heroines and credible, erotic bedroom scenes. As the troubled wife, a psychologist who loves her husband but despises public life, Harris refracts her wonderful daffiness through a spectrum of conflicting emo tions. Streep, in her first comic screen role, is at once a canny politico, a blithe belle and an uninhibited sexual partner...
Things Past is Muggeridge in a strange new vein, neither very comic nor very Christian, if Christianity is assumed to include a measure of charity toward one's fellow man. The collection is arranged to show the development of Muggeridge's attitudes over time, and if it establishes that his religious beliefs are longstanding ones, it also shows that the author's store of hope for this imperfect world was exhausted by his disillusionment in Moscow...