Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...recent report by a Government committee put most of the blame for skollieism on U.S. comic strips, gangster cinemas and Our Gang comedies...
Jacobowsky and the Colonel (adapted by S. N. Behrman from a play by Franz Werfel; produced by the Theater Guild in association with Jack H. Skirball) uses one of the grimmest moments of the war-the fall of France-for half-satiric, half-fantastic comedy. Its comic thesis is that flight from the Nazis makes strange carfellows. A swaggering, snooty Polish colonel with "a perfect 15th-Century mind" (well played by Louis Calhern) and a rueful, humorous, clever Jewish refugee (delightfully played by Oscar Karlweis) both have to bolt from Paris on the run. The colonel cannot find...
...great Giuseppe Verdi's only well-known comic opera, written when he was 80, based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, has long been regarded by many critics as his best. But ever since its first performance in 1893, with the late great Baritone Victor Maurel in the title role, it has tended to be a flop at the box office. The reasons are several. As drama Falstaff is sketchy, gentle, lacking in emotional intensity. As music, Falstaff is a tapestry of lacy subtleties, so fragile that only the finest opera companies can perform it without tearing...
...into a soldier so disturbs Private Hargrove's captain that after one look at him the officer thinks of transferring to the Navy. In the long run Hargrove and his equally unmilitary comrades learn their trade. But the film devotes most of its time to the comic aspects of their training (mostly polishing garbage cans) and their vestigial private life...
...which when considered together spell out only fair entertainment. A sort of dual plot provides the main themes for the play: the removal of the ancient Scottish Stone of Scone upon which the Scottish Kings were crowned, and the reformation of a reprobate Scotsman are intermingled to produce many comic and many not-so-comic situations...