Word: gag
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There is the elaborate sight gag: Clouseau exits from the wrong door of a plane and gets carried out with the luggage. The Malapropism: "You are pushing my leg." The convoluted scheme: a gang of thieves disguise themselves in Clouseau masks to enter Swiss banks. The third time round, however, the mixture is flat and tasteless. Bud Yorkin's slovenly direction makes the film look as if every expense had been spared, trapping Arkin in a farce of habit that will probably retire Clouseau to oblivion -one picture too late...
...reaction to this kind of performance is unprintable but I do think it's an obvious and unrewarding way to alter more accepted interpretations of the character. And this is also true of James Keach's Achilles, a psychopathic narcissistic Hell's Angel type, quickly uninteresting once the gag wears off. A more original job of reinterpretation is Schmidt's casting of Raymond Singer as the venemous fool Thersites, a character at once completely repellent yet perhaps the only moral person in the play. Singer is young and attractive, and therein lies the original job of reinterpretation. But again after...
...good old ricky-tick days when movie directors wore riding breeches, a favorite cinematic sight gag was to reverse the film, which suddenly sent the actors waddling backwards through doors that closed behind them, putting their hats on instead of taking them off, and shoveling food out of their mouths instead of in. The kids, of course, like to do the same with home movies. Now from Czechoslovakia comes a whole movie that runs from end to beginning...
Wakefield is an incurable essayist. He takes the sting out of his reporting chapters with neatly balanced explanations of the self-evident. An absurdity is either absurd or it is not; a horror brings on the gag reflex or it does not. What reporting there is seems true enough, though Wakefield's modest conclusions will startle few ordinarily demanding readers. But a competently drawn nostril, ear lobe and eyebrow do not add up even to a sketchy portrait; the well-fed, worried face of supernation deserves a better effort...
...Death," runs the old insurance man's gag, "is nature's way of telling you to slow down." The joke is the cinematic principle of this catatonic, corpse-cluttered western, which comes as close as a film can to a still picture...