Word: gingold
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...colonel was Comedian Art Carney, joined by Hermione Gingold in a parody of Separate Tables: Carney lost in Hermione's furs, and Carney in suicidal despair over having given the "wrong order" on D-day ("Desert!") was as funny as anything seen on TV. On his first of eight monthly shows this year, Carney was badly hampered by some dreadful jokes and a couple of high-school-level musical numbers. But in the skits he triumphed with his marvelously mobile face, his adaptable voice (he started in radio 17 years ago on a serious news show, impersonating Churchill...
...show's high point: Carney impersonating Ed Murrow impersonating the Delphic Oracle. In the manner of Murrow's Small World program, Carney conversed with a famous Riviera party giver ("It's really been one of the most divine and decadent seasons I can recall," gurgled Hermione Gingold); a twitch-lipped Hollywood star impersonated by Edie Adams, who did her too-familiar but still funny parody of Marilyn Monroe; and a Greek shipowner (Hans Conried) who has just bought a new Picasso-"his oldest boy." Throughout, Carney kept up the authentic Murrow atmosphere of portentousness and cigarette smoke...
...Hollywood's Farley Granger is the stuff telephone poles are made of. TV's Polly Bergen makes a winning Elizabeth, but the ex-Pepsi Cola Girl seems to be selling her part rather than playing it. As Mrs. Bennet, the huntress of five carriage-trade husbands, Hermione Gingold growls, minces and struts through her endless matrimonial campaigns. She would be fiercely funny if First Impressions were a bedroom farce, and not a genteel domestic satire. As it is, Comedienne Gingold breaks up the house, and shatters the tenuous Jane Austen mood. The musical's key failure...
Fortunately, the supporting cast is unusually strong. Hermione Gingold and Elsa Lanchester make a couple of hilariously weird sisters, and Ernie Kovacs has some wonderful moments as a subnormal supernaturalist...
...picture offers an occasional soupçcon of French seasoning ("The only people who make love all the time are liars"), some charming lecherdemain in the scenes involving Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold, a sexless performance from Caron and a lifeless one from Jourdan, a wonderful happy ending which wittily demonstrates that life has more tricks than an old tart, a singable (though not memorable) musical score, and enough bibelots, furbelows, fichus, berthas, boas, sconces, socles, credenzas, teapoys and Canterburies to deliriously overdecorate this most ornate of the cinema's recurrent funerals...