Word: jazzbo
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...name Twyla-curious, fanciful, perhaps not quite grownup. Or it may be her stage image as a witchy little jazzbo with a boxer's shuffle and a baseball pitcher's kick. For nearly two decades Twyla Tharp has gone about the business of being a choreographer, methodically building a first-rate company and a large, acclaimed body of work. But her reputation, at least outside serious dance circles, has lacked weight. She handles certain material, such as social dancing, pop songs and pop-up emotions, better than anyone else, in an idiom that seems delightfully impromptu and improper...
...success in only one respect: the picture will not make money. To begin with, it constitutes a tired tract for the hysterical cult of hip that preaches salvation through syncopation. The plot, moreover, is a canned arrangement played to death in a dozen previous pictures of this sort: progressive jazzbo (Bobby Darin) goes commercial; loses art, loses heart, loses girl (Stella Stevens); but in the reprise he straightens out and flies right. The script is an anthology of unintentional hilarities. "Just where do I stand," the heroine hollers angrily when the hero advises her to give up sex, "without...
...near one in years." But the anonymity is not likely to last. After a difficult day, Gleason issued from his penthouse at the George V looking, in spotless maroon jacket and pink shirt, like an Alp covered with wild flowers. He proceeded to the Olympia Music Hall, where his jazzbo buddies Pee Wee Russell and Buck Clayton were playing. Clayton dragged him onstage, and Gleason, whose French is limited to "encore doo van," got howls with a Gallic doubletalk routine. Later, he joked with French Clown Jacques Tati and wandered off to find late-evening brandy with his jazzmen...
...blithely keeps on buying Brooklyn Bridge until all his cash and even his saxophone are gone. The taxi dancer, who by this time is in love with the twerp, wants to put him back in the music business, but how can the poor girl make $200 to buy her jazzbo a new set of tubes? In New York, says Scriptwriter Kanin grimly, there is only one way a poor girl can make that kind of money. Will she do it? Will she let the villain sully her virtue and filet her soul? Hardly. Scriptwriter Kanin may find it good show...
...with surprising results. Frances Faye's bone-dry, heart-of-gold style is strangely apt as the voice of the inconstant Bess, and Mel Tormé's smoky tones give a proper touch of pathos to the part of the crippled Porgy. The oily voice of Al ("Jazzbo") Collins fills in narrative gaps between tunes. This procedure dilutes some of Porgy's dramatic excitement, but musically it is an exhilarating affair...