Word: gagged
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tenor Melchior promptly quit and wound up his 24 years at the Met with a switch on the oldest gag in opera: "If I don't miss the swan boat in Lohengrin Thursday night, it will be my goodbye to the Metropolitan . . ." After the performance he said, "Not only as Lohengrin but as Lauritz Melchior, I have sung my swan song . . ." His fans gave him a warm ovation and tearful dressing-room farewells...
Died. Sidney Arthur ("Sid") Field, 45, bulb-nosed British comic who soared to fame in wartime revues (Strike a New Note, Strike It Again); in Richmond, Surrey. Disdaining the fast gag, Field mixed the pathetic and the preposterous into an art reminiscent of Chaplin's, but with a slapdash gusto...
...play has some funny lines, but not many; and some nice performances, especially Dauphin's. The outstanding thing about it is its phenomenal memory: it exploits every type of gag, farce twist or comedy situation that ever made good in the past. It is one more of the Rodgers & Hammerstein-produced hits (John Loves Mary, Happy Birthday) that give the obvious and the mediocre a finishing-school education, and that hug a safe, tried formula on the theory of nothing venture, nothing lose...
Nevertheless, the gag rule in Baltimore was dead. And the Supreme Court had, in effect, upheld the right of a free press over what the Baltimore judges considered the rights of an individual...
What lifts Tight Little Island above its own high mark of insular drollery, and turns its chuckles into laughs, is its mastery of the visual gag. The picture moves quietly but surely until the islanders make a rendezvous with the derelict Scotch. Then, in picturing their celebration, their efforts to hide the loot from customs raiders and a chase to rescue the biggest cache of whisky, the camera goes on an inspired spree. For lightness, comic movement and inventive detail, these sequences are worthy of Rene Clair...