Word: comicalities
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Partly as comic relief, partly to prove that Leftist Spain's munitions agents had been hoodwinked into paying out good Spanish gold for outdated equipment, the show also included a 3-ton, 6-in. cannon, mounted on a high-wheeled carriage and an old Winchester rifle. The cannon, worthy of a museum, was manufactured at Obujov. Russia in 1864. The Winchester, with the date 1860 still visible on its barrel, was the type used by U. S. frontiersmen in the Indian fighting...
...December 1936, critics complained that Playwrights George Kaufman and Moss Hart had failed to equip it with plot, that their eccentric characters were freaks rather than human beings. Translation from the stage to cinema sometimes has extraordinary results. In this case, the result is spectacular proof that the comic exterior of You Can't Take It With You concealed not merely plot but superb dramatic conflict, and that its characters, far from being freaks, were really human beings drawn on the heroic scale. Brilliantly explored by Writer Robert Riskin, Director Frank Capra and the season's most astutely...
...produce either: 1) composite photographs, in which the images are superimposed; or 2) photomontages, in which they make a composition. Combinations and variants are innumerable. To one school of photographers this technique is a low-grade amusement or else commercial fakery. Photomontage, however, was first used for serio-comic artistic purposes by the Dadaists around 1919, was later developed in Germany by Experimenters Moholy-Nagy and Walter Peterhans (see p. 50). It has been ably used for posters by Soviet Artist El Lissitzky, Swiss Herbert Matter, Hollander Cesar Domela-Nieuwenhuis, German Herbert Bayer, and badly used in many...
...less real than apparent. In My Man Godfrey and The Awful Truth, humor bubbled from the contrast between the essential sanity of the people involved and the dangerous eccentricity of their behavior. Four's A Crowd, by presenting its people as fundamentally irresponsible, robs their irresponsibility of comic impact and turns what might have been high-tension comedy into mildly funny farce. Best shot: Errol Flynn, having hurriedly put an iron gate between himself and the great Danes, pausing to pull one of their tails between the bars, give it an emphatic bite...
...outspoken. In 1932 this advertising reached a pinnacle, which Scott officials recall with obvious pain, in the "acid campaign," whose headlines took the slant of "I'VE GOT TO HAVE *** A MINOR OPERATION!'' Current campaigns still stress "harsh tissue dangers" but somewhat less crassly. A sample comic-strip ad today shows little Jeanie prattling, "It scratches awful, mummy...