Word: gildas
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What a shame it was for the comics of the first decade of Saturday Night Live that there was ever such a thing as movies. First Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and John Belushi proved their worth as sketch artists who could inhabit weird, endearing characters while running wild laps around them. Then they exiled themselves into big-screen junk where they looked forlorn and their talents were cramped. Ninety minutes of Doctor Detroit offered a lot less pure Aykroyd than five minutes of his Nixon on S.N.L...
Wallace is referring, of course, to Gilda Radner's famous Saturday Night Live parodies and to Walters' most famous, frequently mocked question. Actually, it was a follow-up question she asked Katharine Hepburn in 1981, after the actress said she felt like a tree: "What kind of a tree are you?" (Hepburn said...
Hogarthian characters abounded in the theater. There was Abel, the flamboyant homosexual who would hoot at pulchritudinous customers; Norma the manager, who had the face of a hatchet and the demeanor of Torquemada; Katie, poor, sweet, knocked-up Katie; vivacious Gilda, a fortyish woman of Italian extraction who had been raised in Ethiopia and who now devoted herself to the music and careers of heavy metal bands; baby-faced George, an aspiring actor who claimed to have had a meeting with Steven Bochco's people; and Autumn, as delicate a ditz as ever broke a man's heart...
...with their counterparts of the 1930s and '40s. Can the dim-bulb performance of Marisa Tomei in Only You (1994) stand up to Carole Lombard's luminosity in My Man Godfrey (1936)? How can Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Drew Barrymore compete with Rita Hayworth's Gilda, Gene Tierney's Laura, Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa in Casablanca and Merle Oberon's Cathy in Wuthering Heights? It's the same twentysomething age group, but these actresses had more than faces. They were riper, more mature, more compelling and light-years ahead in performance power. Jean Harlow...
...woman in the past five years is Julia Sweeney's Pat -- and the joke is that no one knows Pat's sex. The show has all but abandoned nuanced relationship comedy in favor of TV parodies and broad, running characters that are like antic vaudeville acts. Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner used to play sketches in bed together. Now we have Operaman...