Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Written for the screen by Albert Innaurato (Gemini), one of the most gifted young U.S. playwrights, Verna is both a comic and a sorrowful account of a girl's peculiar heroism. The humor can be found in Innaurato's sassy dialogue, which gives new resonance to the lingo of '40s movies, and in the many vintage U.S.O. routines that dot the film's narrative. Underneath the surface wit is Innaurato's portrait of Verna's aching loneliness and cultural malaise. When Verna, for the sake of her nonexistent career, jilts an Army captain whom...
...high quality of the script is matched by every aspect of the production. Despite his limited budget, Director Ronald F. Maxwell has not stinted on important details: he shot the war scenes on location in Europe and enlisted Broadway Choreographer Donald Saddler and Burlesque Comic Joey Faye to help create the vaudeville numbers. Maxwell's casting is precise. Spacek, playing a spiritual sister of the lost souls she acted in Badlands and 3 Women, is diaphanously vulnerable, but also makes a fine clown in her off-pitch songs. William Hurt, her awkward military suitor, is sensitive and attractive...
...went on to become the wife of a similarly-obsessed Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She should have better taste in husbands, poor girl. Such an unthreatening, inoffensive cast must also have assured Reiner that although the idea of God presented as a stand-up comic would be offensive to some, most would smile anyway and have a good time...
...anywhere" routine, in which Burns will drive by in a cab, control all the stations on a car radio, or appear suddenly in a supermarket aisle (this type of thing has been used from Topper to Bewitched, and was employed to greater comic effect by a steel-jawed villain in this summer's repulsive Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me); and three, the "desperation name-in-vain" pun (Denver: Whew! Thank God. Burns: You're welcome...
Technically, Oh God! is an unholy mess, with soupy music and thoroughly insensitive editing (which, for example, totally destroys the performance of William Daniels as Denver's boss, an actor whose magnificent comic timing is chopped to pieces). Maybe Reiner and Gelbart could have wrung more humor from hell instead of heaven; Exorcist II: The Heretic was infinitely more amusing...