Word: everymanic
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Stop the World-I Want to Get Off is a kind of Everyman coloring book for quasi-grownups. Color Everyman's face white with flour. Dab on a maraschino-cherry nose. House him in a circus tent, and dress him in clown pants baggy enough to hold a pair of baby kangaroos. Name him "He" or "The Man." Make him walk like a mechanical doll, and then propel this symbolic cipher through a life cycle from the cradle to the grave that seems to take almost as long to stage as it would to live through...
World, calls his everymanikin Mr. Littlechap. Newley mimes a good bit of Littlechap's saga in an imitation of Marcel Marceau. Marceau knows the art of saying more with less: Newley says less with more. Though Littlechap periodically shouts "Stop the World!", he is not an Angry Young Everyman. He marries the boss's daughter (she is pregnant by Littlechap at the time), advances from a branch office to head of the firm, enters Parliament, is dubbed a peer, and even gets into the club of his choice. "Snobs...
...Italian upper class, L'Avventura studies an individual, not a class. It unfolds through personalities instead of tiresome figures transplanted from an Everyman play. And even more gratifying, this gracefully wrought story reveals a person whose uniqueness is respected; it is not a discombobulated tirade against a way-ward society...
...those who wish an appropriate English title for La Dolce Vita, I suggest: "Everyman his own voyeur: an expose in five orgies." Episodic and long, this latest Fellini effort contains brilliant camera work, but little else to recommend itself...
Worst of all, La Dolce Vita fails to attract the moviegoer as much as it repulses him, fails to inspire his sympathies as well as his disgust. Everyman is passive throughout the picture, largely unconscious of the awful fate that is overtaking him. He therefore puts up no moral struggle against his fate, and without struggle there is no drama. Many spectators will be inclined to agree with the character who remarks in the concluding scene: "Mamma mia, what a disgusting mess...