Word: condon
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...plot is yet another rehashing of a really old (I mean really old) theme. Right after breaking up with his girlfriend (Eliza Rosenbluth), Zoole captures hapless burglar Vito Antonucci (David Condon) as the latter tries to escape from his apartment. Zoole ties him to the kitchen counter and inflicts a variety of comic insults upon him. They spend most of the play talking, and in the process they find out about themselves and each other, share touching and comic moments...
...Condon makes a good straight man, strengthening O'Keefe's role with solid, if uninspired acting. While Vito is sometimes boring, he is the most believable character in the play. (Of course, given the competition...) Condon submerges himself in the character, so his accent and mannerisms are those of Vito. When the part requires him to convince the audience that he's homosexual (did I forget to mention that?), he pulls...
...star, persuaded President John F. Kennedy to give his blessing to the project. Candidate opened in the fall of 1962, to mixed reviews and soft box office. "We had both sides of the political spectrum mad at us," says George Axelrod, who fashioned a terrific screenplay from Richard Condon's scathing comic apocalypse of a novel. "In Paris Communists picketed outside a theater on the Champs Elysees at the same time that Red-baiters were picketing in Orange County. Trouble was, all these people were outside the theater, not inside...
...Condon's book is not so stirring an achievement as to be inevitable, but it is cheerful and funny, and no effort should be made to avoid it. Charley, of course, is the hero of Prizzi's Honor, the 1982 Condon novel that Director John Huston turned into one of Jack Nicholson's better films. There Charley was seen at mid-life, and his crisis was that his wife (Kathleen Turner in the film) turned out to be not only a Mob hit woman but a boodler who tried to grab some Mafia loot. Wistfully but dutifully, Charley killed...
...take over her grandfather's operation. As usual with the author's recent entertainments, the fact that none of this makes much sense becomes a literary metaphor on the order of Melville's white whale, implying as it does that the entire world is nuts. This is clearly Condon's view, and he is mightily persuasive as he defines human character: foaming perversity, rascality, obsessional lunacy, wowserism, religious mania, assault and battery, and our old friends greed and lust. No sloth, though; Charley and his chums sure do keep active...