Word: frankenstein
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...villains are and what values are being knocked around. There is substance in laughing at their films because the tricks played have moral meaning. Chaplin's imitation is funny, Groucho's anti-establishment pranks on hotel-managers and rich matrons are funny. Gene Wilder's charicature of Dr. Frankenstein is funny; the audience cheers them on. Jack Nicholson dumping the heiress in a birdbath is discomfiting because she's nice and he's a slimy creep. The indignity should be the other way around...
...Carnal Knowledge were based on real and depressing subject matter from which Nichols shaped a lot of very funny scenes. The relationship of humor to unhappy truth was accurate. If he conceived The Fortune as homage/satire about the vaudeville era, he forgot what Mel Brooks proved in Young Frankenstein: that the best way to poke fun at past cinematic formulas is still to take them seriously. He gave us buffoonery but it was a joke we didn't catch. The grimy, bourgeois wit of his earlier films was more perceptive and more easily shared...
...human voices-or rather, canned choral sounds transmogrified by Tomita's Mellotron, an electronic keyboard device that plays prerecorded tapes. Things perk up considerably with the first picture, "The Gnome," a succession of subterranean squeaks and giggles that resemble a band of tipsy trolls frolicking beneath Frankenstein's castle. As for "The Old Castle," it sounds like a caravan of balalaika players pursuing an Arabian shawm virtuoso...
...piano stool in the general direction of the audience (but actually into the pit). He has been known to dye his hair orange or pink for some gigs, to bat tennis balls into the crowd, and once in Los Angeles he hired actors to dress as Queen Elizabeth, Frankenstein and Elvis Presley and wander around the stage. Whether this represents a display of unquenchable energy, the response of a sometime wallflower suddenly encouraged to be the life of the party, or just overripe showmanship, it makes for the best show, and the best biz, on the pop scene today...
...Bridge of Frankenstein [1935]. The original, with Boris Karloff. Ch. 5, 3:30 p.m. B/W, 1 1/2 hours...