Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Happens Every Spring [20th-Century-Fox] is the kind of thing that happens only in the mind of a hard-pressed Hollywood gag writer. The gag is acted out by Ray Milland, a serious young chemistry instructor at a Midwest university who is also a serious baseball fan. One day, puttering with mysterious solutions in his laboratory, Milland accidentally hits upon a liquid mixture that repels wood. It takes the low-salaried chemist just a second longer than it takes he audience to see the possibilities of his wonderful compound. When the idea dawns, he skips out on his college...
...Jerry Lewis, a 23-year-old with horse teeth and a bangtail bob, who is probably the most precocious comic to come out of the wings since Milton Berle was a Wunderkind. Young Jerry already has good control of half-a-dozen comedy styles. He can deliver a gag, dance & sing, play the sappy adolescent ("If I go wit' girls, I get pimples") or ape a romantic singer ("Dance, Mrs. Resnick, dance!"). When Dean asks, "Why did you bring your car to New York?" Jerry says, in what seems the perfect answer for Jerry: "I need it here...
...Berle. Through the years, hard-working Comic Berle drove himself so overbearingly to fulfill his destiny that many a bitter show-business colleague came to regard him as a gag-stealing braggart. Now, having conquered at last, Milton seems to be living down his bad reputation. Success agrees with him. Says George Jessel: "He doesn't have to try so hard now, and so he's not so liable to be stepping on other people's toes." Once damned by many who had to work with him on the way up, he now has the respect...
...fall, are still feeling pain from an old Berle-inflicted wound. Berle ("The Thief of Badgags") has always" been so intoxicated by the sound of audience laughter that he could never resist using likely material-even if someone else had used it first. He is firmly convinced that any gag sounds better leaving his own mouth, and, argues his faithful flock, all jokes are public property any how. An understanding friend explains: "The guy just can't help imitating something that has entertained . . . His heart is in his work. He isn't happy unless he's entertaining...
...fancy buffet lunch (courtesy of the Southern Pacific), a woman sword swallower had dropped in from a circus to swallow three swords, and Mayor Fletcher Bowron had read a proclamation making Campbell "mayor of the day." The Chamber of Commerce sent a chamber pot as a good-natured gag, and W. R. Hearst wired his congratulations...