Word: foremans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...plot is as thin as a very thin slice of salami (which could easily have been a line in this play). David Kolowitz, though working at Mr. Foreman's machine shop wants to be an actor. His friend Marvin shows him an ad for actors in the New York Post and David quits work early to head for the illegitimate theatre. There he is stunned by the leading lady's asset, her body, but not so completely that he doesn't come back in the end to his girl-friend Wanda, nor enroll in pharamacy school as his parents have...
...most of the jokes are lousy, at that. The show starts with a phone call from David's girlfriend. Mr. Foreman picks up the receiver, asks who's calling, and exclaims, "Wanda? What kind name is Wanda?" That's a joke. Yet there are flashes of wit: vicariously excited by David's reports, his friend Marvin asks David if he undressed the leading lady (Yvonne De Carlo--and what an asset she has) or vice versa. David hesitates a second and then debonairly replies, "We got a kid off the streets and paid him a quarter to do it," (After...
...cast fail to transform the criticially poor script. Miss De Carlo is nice to look at, but seems as silly as her lines. Alan Mowbray, who plays her father, is so bored he's boring. And Irving Jacobson, a strange combination of Eddie Cantor and Mr. Magoo, as Mr. Foreman, is as cliched a first generation imigrant as you'll ever want...
...Hollywood. He has now finished playing a drifter in a forthcoming TV episode in hopes that his grandpap's talents were hereditary. At least some of them seem to be, because "Hick" is already a pretty fair rider and roper, used to do it for a living as foreman on his father's Laredo ranch. "Back home in Texas, I made $5 a day," he says. "But here I make $250." So he figures he'll try acting for a while. "If I don't make it," he shrugs, "I can always find something...
Shaped by discipline, such boldness might have made a classic indictment of war. Instead, Foreman has spent two and a half years producing a faintly vulgar medley nearly three hours long. Even the film's finest scene is marred by excess: as a pathetically boyish American deserter is led before a firing squad in a vast snowy field, the sound track erupts with Frank Sinatra's dulcet warbling of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, followed by Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The choice seems arbitrary, a victory cheaply won. Or does an audience really have...