Word: feldmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Feldman does not yet have Brooks' sure ability to touch and goofily transform each and every cliche base on which his chosen model rests. Around the middle of this picture, energy flags and a sort of desperate silliness begins...
Directed by MARTY FELDMAN Screenplay by MARTY FELDMAN and CHRIS ALLEN...
...other hand, the movie, especially in the early going, is full of good gags - the very idea that handsome Michael York, in the title role, and the diminutive, popeyed Feldman could be twin brothers being among the best of them. It has good fun as well with a Dickensian orphanage and Trevor Howard, as a hearty English squire, who, upon hearing his newborn baby cry, instantly rushes into the room to give the infant a hiding so that early on he will appreciate the value of stoicism. Feldman has a keen eye for the sillier conventions of movie narrative...
Movable Scar. At a guess, it is fa miliarity with the social usages of his na tive England and the accumulated non sense of the medium in which he works that generate the affectionate, and effective, contempt animating the first portion of Feldman's film. Even when he and it move further afield, following the disgraced Beau into his North Af rican exile as a legionnaire, there's some amusing game afoot. Peter Ustinov, as a sadistic sergeant, is equipped with a movable scar - not unlike Feldman's shifty hump in Frankenstein - and the director has given...
Even so, there are enough imaginative gags and such a pleasantly adoles cent spirit about the film as to warrant looking in on it some hot summer's night. It is to be hoped, though, that Feldman - and everybody else - will follow Woody Allen's lead, give up parodies of popular cultural forms and turn their attention, in the manner of Annie Hall, to life itself...