Word: greasepainted
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ANTHONY NEWLEY and Leslie Bricusse must have thought themselves quite ambitious. They wanted to create a clever, innovative show that would transcend the limitations of conventional musical comedy--a show that would say something. Instead, they made The Roar of the Greasepaint--The Smell of the Crowd in which the British class struggle is simplified, set to music, and peppered with punny lines and broad gags. A silly little show, it's like dramatizing a dissertation on social democracy by Mickey Mouse...
Nevertheless, director Josh Milton--blessed with a talented, hyperkinetic cast--manages an enjoyable rendition of Greasepaint. He proves that with enough brass, good cheer, white teeth, and confetti, even the most banal of musical comedies can become pleasing...
...only other thing worth mentioning about Dracula--aside from the terrible Latex, greasepaint and collodion jobs on a few of the vampires, and the turn-of-the century, tradition vs. modernism theme Badham and Richter apparently tried to concoct in the visuals--is the great love scene that stopped the show on Broadway. As Dracula and Lucy begin to embrace, their figures dissolve into multi-colored silhouettes and recede into the distance, whereupon a bunch of shapely limbs wind and unwind to John Williams' less than austere music. The whole thing is modeled on the title sequences in the Bond...
...Band Wagon. These are the best musicals: the ones about the addictive greasepaint itself. And this Vincente Minelli masterpiece comes delightfully close to topping them all. It swirls and taps about a musical within a musical, featuring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as two cool professionals who warm up like toaster coils in the course of the production. Jack Buchanan, as the director, is a portrait in Orson Welles-like pomposity and does some hoofing to match the skinny master himself. Somehow Charisse managed to write a three-minute "classical" dance number into her contract, and in the middle...
...most talented directors of American films have done their finest work the first time out. I'm thinking especially of Orson Welles and "Citizen Kane" and John Huston, who produced this hard-boiled masterpiece on his first feature assignment for Warner Brothers. Like Welles, Huston grew up around the greasepaint. And like Welles, Huston came to films with a gleeful yet prodigiously discriminating eye for characature and atmosphere-creating jargon. He handles Humphrey Bogart perfectly in the role of Sam Spade--by letting Bogart do Bogart, but without the "sentimentalist" soft spots of Rick in "Casablanca" or the nervousness...