Word: comically
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Comic Jimmy Durante, who once carried $100,000 worth of insurance on his celebrated nose, had reason to regret letting the policy lapse. While rehearsing a TV show with Schmaltz Pianist Liberace, Jimmy had a long-overdue accident, best described in his own words: "There's this piano scene. I'm playin' a duet wit Liberace. So I hits two notes, he hits two notes. Then I say, 'In a competition, you got to use all your weapons.' So I starts to play wit my nose. So Liberace comes over and accidentally touches the piano...
...51st Dragon, taken from the text by the late Heywood Broun, is the second cartoon in U.P.A.'s (United Productions of America) series of comic legends for moderns. Like the first, an animation of James Thurber's Unicorn in the Garden (TIME, Oct. 26), it is a nasal little ballad that ends with a sly intellectual hiccup. The admirers of Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker and Porky Pig are not likely to be broken up with hilarity. Still, it is refreshing to laugh at an idea instead of an oink, and the kidding of medieval styles...
King of Hearts (by Jean Kerr & Eleanor Brooke) sends up a shower of witty sparks over a rather flat and meager landscape. A satiric farce, it concerns a megalomaniac cartoonist (Donald Cook) who regards his comic strips as profounder than the Wise Books of the East, and himself as a sort of Einstein with sex appeal. He is exhibited in varied but always-voluble relation to an assistant (Jackie Cooper), an interviewer, a syndicate chief (David Lewis), a small boy he adopts (Rex Thompson) and a fiancée (Cloris Leachman) whose romantic eyes are opened by, among other things...
Prince Valiant (20th Century-Fox). In this movie version of Harold Foster's comic strip, Producer Robert L. Jacks and Director Henry Hathaway have not only matched the museum-copied look of the well-known Sunday viking and his cohorts; they have caught the panel's inner mood of stilted boyhood reverie as well. The outer semblance was attained partly by chance-the CinemaScope screen coincides roughly with the dimensions Foster favors for his cautiously grand panoramas...
...actors, too, were chosen for their resemblance to the comic-strip characters. Robert Wagner, in a pageboy wig and leather buskins, is Prince Val stepping off the page. Janet Leigh, in a palomino peruke, makes a pretty Aleta, James Mason a swart and athletic villain. A couple of vikings, Victor McLaglen and former Heavyweight Champ Primo Camera, with their grunting and spluttering through chin-wigs, give a show that can only be matched by the Wednesday-night wrestling on television...