Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Halpern clan is a family of cartoon monsters. Vulgar, egomaniacal Mama (Ruth Gordon) is a compulsive shopper with delusions of solvency. Masochistic Papa (Walter Matthau) is a corner-cutting shoe manufacturer who is going bankrupt in a paroxysm of anguish and gallows humor. Son Bernie (Anthony Holland) is a leaky, self-expressing drip, the kind that leaves a brown stain in a washbowl. At play's end, simple-witted Bernie is out in the once pristine West shilling with a tom-tom for some once noble Indians who are now corrupt enough to con the tourists with their fabricated...
Onstage, the Christys are one of the healthiest spectacles imaginable. They trot out from the wings, line up playfully, start right feet tapping in heavy unison, and burst into song. Their music is a bland mix of broad harmonies, familiar tunes, corny humor and just enough of the folk music spirit to cash in on the most avid adult record buyer-the man whose ear has been tuned by popular music but whose developing tastes lead him to folk music. Where the purer folk singers such as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger alienate some audiences with their austerity, the impure...
...mild comic conceit at best, and time has made the resulting camouflage and persiflage dimly dispiriting. In 1936, Russia was remotely terrible but not dangerous, still exotic enough for period romance and period humor, attitudes no 1963 playgoer can sustain. Tovarich needed a boldly inventive face lifting, but its book and lyrics sadly sag. Its tune-shy music may please any metronomes in the audience. Sample wit: "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a potato and make our own vodka." Sample lyric...
...earlier scenes, however, the low jinks are vigorous and apropos. Genet has a gruesomely pictorial sense of humor ("Is the archbishop dead?"-"I hope so. His head is tied to the handlebars of a little boy's bicycle") and Scenarist Ben Maddow has a cute wit of his own ("The world is full of whores, but a good bookkeeper is hard to find"). Too often, unhappily, the film is cute where the play was poetic, too often Director Joseph Strick permits his performers to natter what they are intended to intone. But moments of lurid lyricism survive, and vestiges...
...Notes' soloists shone. Tenor Saxophonist Ben Friedman, a real crowd-pleaser, is technically master of his instrument. His best solo, on Thelonius Monk's Straight, No Chaser, was a honking, exuberant anthology of tenor sax styles, jumping from Johnny Hodges to Ornette Coleman to John Coltrane with deftness and humor. Friedman is strongly influenced by Coltrane, with a little Getz and "Fathead" Newman thrown in, and he has not yet found his own niche...