Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...course it's grating, flatulent, desperate-all in the best and the worst manner of Mel Brooks. As comic and as film maker, Brooks wants to knock you cockeyed. For a laugh, he will do anything, try anything. He rains gags. After a Brooks bit, audiences can be exhausted; after a Brooks film, there is the lingering feeling of having been pummeled. Brooks is like a young, slightly skittish fighter whose energy compensates for lack of finesse. He hits out wildly, continuously, hoping that a few punches will land. Since comedy audiences usually have their guard down (they want...
Frankenstein's monster is Peter Boyle (Joe), an actor wonderfully deft at being clumsy. The movie galvanizes just about the time of his appearance. Boyle shows up in, and helps make work, the two sharpest scenes: an encounter with a blind hermit (Gene Hackman, doing a dexterous comic cameo), in which the monster is assaulted by the hermit's well-intentioned blundering; and a brief foray into show biz, in which Frankenstein and his creation put on a fractured vaudeville. Brooks is always at his best making fun of the delicious stupidities of popular entertainment (recall Springtime...
Died. Harry Hershfield, 89, perennial master of ceremonies, raconteur, columnist and cartoonist; in Manhattan. Hershfield first exercised his wit as the cartoonist-creator of the Desperate Desmond and Abie the Agent comic strips. In the 1940s he gained a wide following as one of the three gagmen who tried to tell funnier stories than the radio audience of Can You Top This? A leading light on the "rubber chicken circuit" for more than 50 years, Hershfield was famous for such sententiae as: "A conscience cannot prevent sin. It only prevents you from enjoying...
...such doubts assail the two leads. Harrison is letter-perfect, which is not too surprising since Sebastian is simply Henry Higgins 18 years older. His nasal drawl, his lounge-lizard posture, his Swiss-clock comic timing are on superb display. Harris matches him. She seems to have discovered the secret that eluded Ponce de Leon. With each passingplay, she appears more youthful -her face lineless, her figure trim, her carriage gracefully girlish. In acting subservient to her husband while deftly stage-managing everything, she strongly recalls those '30s heroines of S.N. Behrman's comedies who used...
...three grow on the reader who is soon lost in comic-strip chronicles marked by great wit, suspense and true humor rising both from character and from a remarkably sophisticated view of the world. These four books variously send Tintin, Haddock, Snowy and two idiot detectives in black bowlers into the desert to chase opium smugglers, into central Europe to try to keep King Ottokar from losing the throne of Syldavia, back into history to recall the voyages of Haddock's pirate ancestor Red Rackham on the ship Unicorn, and, finally, down to the bottom of the Caribbean...