Word: gagged
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...over the emptiness of Hollywood's recent productions. Their scripts shun new insights into human behavior. They lack even the requisite for plain entertainment-richness of detail. The incidents that occasionally occur in these films are threadbare. Save that gag. Sam-you'll need it for those ten TV shows you're doing after this script...
...comes off as a cross between Andy Williams and Soupy Sales, plays the title role in The Lawyer -a young man named Tony Petrocelli who lives somewhere out in L.B.J. Country in spite of being a product of Harvard Law and Providence, Rhode Island. (In a tired, overworked running gag, he keeps explaining that his name is pronounced "Petro-CHELLI-CHELLI !" but the local Yahoos obviously have never even seen a Prince Spaghetti commercial.) Tony, as might be expected, is not very big in the Southwest. For one thing, he wears a vest. For another, he drinks root beer instead...
...films from Foreign Correspondent to Torn Curtain. But at 70, Hitchcock seems suddenly to have forgotten his own recipe. Topaz contains no chills, no fever-and most disappointing, no entertainment. By the finale, the predictability of every turn and the grossness of the heroes and villains recall the old gag about the espionage agent who whispered a code message to a locked door. "Wrong apartment," came the reply. "I'm Ginsberg the tailor. You want Ginsberg the spy, upstairs...
Those familiar with Chaplin only through fragments will discover in The Circus an architectural discipline. Chaplin would spend minutes on-screen setting up a single gag or pratfall, and even longer giving his comedy the true roots of pathos. At the finale, Charlie has caused the owner to stop abusing his stepdaughter, but at a terrible price: the tramp has stepped aside so that the girl can marry a tightrope walker in a claw-hammer coat. Charlie watches the circus wagons wheel off, then once more turns and waddles away...
...FREE. The basic plot of this tepid little comedy is an old chestnut, dropping with a slightly pathetic spin: Blind Boy meets Girl, Blind Boy loses Girl, Blind Boy gets Girl. Playwright Leonard Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself but simply a one-man situation-and-gag file...