Word: kramden
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Michael Moore, the director of the film documentary Roger & Me, is a hybrid of two Ralphs -- Kramden and Nader. The son of an autoworker, he has the persona of a bumbling working guy; he is blessed with brilliant comic timing, and his waistline is Gleasonesque. At the same time, Moore was once the editor of a left-wing magazine, and he considers himself an activist sniffing out the hypocrisies of corporate America. The comedian and the reformer lurk within Moore, and just as he did with Roger & Me, he winningly manages to express both these sides of himself...
...consternation and shock at domestic abuse ((BEHAVIOR, July 4)) by a nation raised on television and movies are simply another illustration of the hypocrisy and duplicity of American society. How many times have we chuckled at the ravings of Ralph Kramden, who, raising his fist near his wife's head, sputters, "One of these days, Alice. One of these days -- POW -- right to the moon"? How much money was grossed from films with titles such as How to Murder Your Wife? Is it only now, when the violent nature of a national sports hero is publicly disclosed, that we pretend...
...same thing every night bored him. He was unbeatable at drinking and telling stories all night in bars, but they don't pay you for that. Where Jackie Gleason really was the Great One, as he called himself with no undue bashfulness, was as the bus driver Ralph Kramden in his long- rerunning TV show, The Honeymooners. In THE GREAT ONE: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF JACKIE GLEASON (Doubleday; $22.50), Time's theater critic, William A. Henry III, sorts amiably through the maze of lies the funnyman wove around his tangled life, including one woozy story about two newlyweds...
...next step is a big syndication deal, then years and years of reruns on local stations and cable. Virtually every TV anniversary, star's death or Emmy Awards show provides an excuse to trot out another edition of Scenes We Like to See Over and Over Again: Ralph Kramden bickering with Alice, Elvis gyrating on Ed Sullivan, Lou Grant meeting Mary Richards for the first time ("I hate spunk...
This is partly a matter of image. Goodman has become our designated Everyman, a Ralph Kramden for the '90s but without the splenetic splutter of Jackie Gleason's immortal creation. An intelligence, a sensitivity he can't quite articulate, just possibly a slight sadness, lurk behind Goodman's eyes, and they ground everything he does in reality. Midler, on the other hand, is our great show-biz floozy, and Allen personifies the anxious urban intellect. It is hard to insert their screen personas into the kind of normal, middle- class lives they are supposed to inhabit here. They require highly...