Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...make certain that the old gags and gimmicks will still work, the studio has wrapped them all up in one supercolossal gag. The whole plot takes place on the Warner Bros. lot. Carson and Dennis Morgan, exuding arch embarrassment, play their real-life selves. So do Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn and a few other Warner stars who have been rushed on for bit roles. For ardent movie fans, these peeks at the great may help carry the film. But for most moviegoers, the spoofing is hardly good enough to conceal the laborious spadework...
Honest Joe Lockman was distressed when he discovered that his destination, Utopia, wasn't marked on his Socony Automobile Guide. But Joe enjoyed a good gag, and when he checked up on the mysterious region he was tickled to find that it derived from the Greek ou (not) and topos (a place...
Sobriety's rise had one interruption. Lloyd posed for a publicity gag shot lighting a cigarette from the lighted fuse of a small bomb. Someone had made a mistake: the bomb was no fake. It exploded, blowing a hole in the ceiling and taking away part of Lloyd's face and the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Only determination pulled him through the accident and the subsequent surgery. But back into the movie business he went. The intent, slightly bewildered, obviously virtuous face of Harold Lloyd began popping out at movie audiences in thousands...
...frequently, he became a thorny symbol. The State Department had never recognized the armed annexation of his country by Russia. Russian diplomats bitterly resented his presence at White House functions, coolly declined invitations on the grounds of illness if he was to be present. "Bilmanitis" became a Washington gag. When he died last year, the Russians recovered from Bilmanitis. But they well knew that they might have a relapse. While there is no Latvian Government in Exile, Latvian Minister to London Karlis Zarins still holds the extraordinary power to appoint diplomats (granted him by his government just before the Russians...
...colored by a tired tenderness for people too much at the mercy of their own appetites and apathies to fight or even to visualize the blackshirt terror closing in. Some readers will not have the patience to keep track of the dozens of lightly sketched characters; others will gag on the implication that communism was the only answer to Mussolini. But A Tale of Poor Lovers is no U.S.-brand party-line novel. It is wise, involved and European-a swarming microcosm of social and psychological complexities in modern Italian life...