Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Juno and the Paycock shows a family meeting a tragic fate through the weaknesses of a comic character. The Paycock's artful dodges and arrant hypocrisies, his braggart airs and grandly drunken delusions, are uproariously funny. But eventually his besotted dance is over and the piper must be paid. Then the light falls on Juno, who-her son murdered, her daughter betrayed, her home destroyed-goes forth, heart crumpled but head high, to begin life over...
...violently, O'Casey pushes the son and daughter into the limelight. Their fate-not having the full force of the play behind it -seems manipulated, its effect on Juno mawkish. But it is proof of O'Casey's real power that his Paycock should remain comic from start to finish. The Paycock is a callous wastrel for whom O'Casey has only bitter scorn; but he is a born "character," and O'Casey lets him cut his capers without ever railing...
Mexican Spitfire (RKO) adds old-fashioned horseplay and pie throwing to the timeworn comic mix-up of a henpecked U. S. husband impersonating an eccentric British lord, who keeps turning up at the wrong moment. The picture also tosses Lupe Velez, scratching and screaming in a tequila baritone, back into the U. S. cinemarena. Sample Velez quips, pointed up by prods, kicks, Mexican curses: "Shud up!", "Why don't you mind my own biz-ness?", "I'm just a big gallstone around his neck," "Shud...
...Jane Withers, makes $10,000 to $12,000 a year on phonograph records that sometimes outsell Bing Crosby's. Another $25,000 a year comes from his magic imprimatur on cap pistols, sweat shirts, cowboy suits, a bandit-hunt game, toothbrushes, bandannas, books, balloons, dolls, a new, syndicated comic strip, make-up kits...
...PEOPLE SING-J. B. Priestley -Harper ($2.50). An old-time music hall comic, an exiled Czech professor, a somewhat sickening heroine (who does not sicken her author) become the storm centre of a three-sided feud in small Dunbury. The argument is of industrialists v. landed snobs v. common people-over which class shall have the use of the Market Hall. Abetted by a lot of old-fashioned plotting and comic incident and by a drunken representative of Old England At Its Best, the workers win, and every good person gets what he was after. Thus combined, Author Priestley...