Word: groucho
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That gremlin with the Groucho stash is really Sandy Dennis, disguised as a payoff man in the movie The Abbess. Based on Novelist Muriel Spark's spoof of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe, the film features Dennis, Melina Mercouri and Geraldine Page as nuns engaging in some unholy intrigue. Says Sandy: "I play a not very bright sister who talks loudly and does what my mother used to call 'all the grunt work' " -including the delivery of hush money to a men's room in Philadelphia. At that point, justice triumphs, and Sandy is nabbed...
While Stephen Hayes plays Jesus with straight-faced gentleness (aside from a few Groucho Marx imitations), other members of the ensemble excel at comic vignettes. Mary Soloschin is very funny as a frenetic old miser who heaps up his wealth in storehouses, Michael der Manuelian captures in excruciating grimaces the plight of a parched seed, and Don Marocchio's impersonation of our former president is painfully accurate. Manulis' directorial coup, however, is his dramatization of the parable of the prodigal son, which features strippers enticing the prodigal to the strains of "Hey, Big Spender" and the amazing vocal contortions...
...memorable event, that fall day in 1929," writes Comedian Groucho Marx, recalling the publication of his first book. Titled Beds and based on his 1920s contributions to old college humor magazines, it was a string of one-liners and double-entendres detailing uses and misuses of the mattress. It also sold like common stocks after the Crash. In fact, recalls Groucho, now 85, "during the next 40 years, people refused to have anything to do with beds. Whole families slept standing up." This month the author will try again with another edition of the book. The 1976 version will include...
...adult heroes in the book become weird variants of Groucho Marx, perhaps spawned by Michaels' boyhood watching the Yiddish theater: wise guys who fast-talk on capitalist society's turf and win. In "Reflections of a Wild Kid," Michaels's persona makes it with an ex-girlfriend by removing the woman's present boyfriend, a nerdish college professor. The persona's method: piss out the window of the woman's apartment, hide in the closet and let the police seize the wrong man--the boyfriend--when they come around. Michaels describes this as "genius...
...straight line offered to James Joyce by a burbling admirer: "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" Snapped Joyce: "No, it did a lot of other things too!" When prompted by the right question, even T.S. Eliot was capable of turning in a passable impression of Groucho Marx. Asked if most editors are not failed writers, Eliot said, "Perhaps, but so are most writers...