Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Neil Simon decides to give a married middle-aged restaurateur a fling or three. Amour: kaput. Laughter: rampant...
...entire world turned into a bleak desert of melancholy, Neil Simon would be an oasis of laughter. His eye for the wryly amusing incongruities of life, his zingy one-line gag-ripostes, his ardently skilled desire to be entertaining-all these have made him the leading U.S. comic playwright for more than a decade. But like the clown with the yen to play Hamlet, Simon has had the urge, and been critically urged, to try his hand at more serious drama. The result is The Gingerbread Lady, a schizoid play in which the dramatist is so busy applying plasters...
Different Ending. Probably Simon is too normal (if the word does not sound pejorative) to intuit the inner nature of the characters he has put onstage. He is too self-disciplined, too efficient, too morally responsible, ever to be able to understand an Evy except from the outside. Laughter is a form of incessant motion in Simon's work. It is a self-protective device by which his characters dodge the bullets of real pain. Simon uses a joke both to ward off hurt and to assuage it. In a play like The Gingerbread Lady, this use of laughter...
Given such grossness, why should Little Big Man be counted as a rambunctious triumph? Because in its 360° scope of slaughter and laughter, the film has contrived to lampoon, revere or revile the length and breadth of the entire frontier. On the trek, it demonstrates inconsistencies and errata. For months audiences will be talking about them. It also accomplishes that rarest achievement, the breathing of life into an ossified art form. The '70s has its first great epic. Blood brother to the 1903 one-reeler, The Great Train Robbery, Little Big Man is the new western to begin...
...have a pretty limited concept of how racism is manifested socially and culturally. (Given the skeletonization of Johnson, and the limited glimpses of the American white community, this is probably inevitable.) When corruptive social forces are embodied as moustache-twirling villains, what is produced is not indignation, but derisive laughter. Similarly, if a black man is victorious even in self-imposed defeat, quiet desperation is glorified. Sackler's decision to uphold the disproven theory that Johnson threw his last title fight under federal pressure is disastrous both dramatically and thematically...