Word: gaggingly
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...Small Dance," for instance, is a pointless story describing a young gentleman's adventures at a debutante ball. The characters, descriptions, and impressions are Lampoon stock in trade apparently passed down from generation to generation. "Atmofphere Pluf" is a gag story built around the use of the Old English "f" to replace "s" on the menn of a country restaurant; this is conceivably a suitable practice around which to build a witty story, but the writer merely thinks of all the words he knows that have "s" in them and substitutes the antiquated "f". If any attention...
...zest. Too often they display the outworn grotesqueries of Carmen Miranda and the excessive juvenility of Actress Powell. Occasionally, to denote conscious hamming by members of the heroine's acting fam ily, the soundtrack breaks into a few pompous bars of Wagner. It is not much of a gag, but it is a handy guide to the intentions of the players...
...June Haver, one of three overprotected daughters of a crotchety Irish widower (James Barton), defies the old man by going into show business and taking up with Showman Tony Pastor (Gordon MacRae). Another daughter (Marsha Jones), who has already defied him by marrying secretly, is expecting twins. The central gag: learning that one of the girls is pregnant, Barton suspects the worst of June. The music and dance routines strike an efficient, lusterless com promise between vaudeville of the Tony Pastor era and the kind now dispensed by television...
...such a shopworn framework. You know perfectly well what will happen when the family buys a dog that Gilbreth disapproves of, and what the cute little remarks are going to be when mother has her twelfth baby. You can easily sense each time the "cheaper by the dozen" gag is coming up. Only Gilbreth's time studies redeem the movie from being completely hackneyed, and they aren't enough to make it really amusing. "Cheaper by the Dozen" is just a quantitative variation on the "Life with Father" theme...
...that there is to be a wedding in the house, for now, after 87 years, a pair of dead lovers can be married, too. The weddings are interrupted by murder, which turns the second half of the evening into a whodunit. The whole evening is tethered to a gag which makes ghosts visible only to virgins...