Word: laurell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What provokes my grandmother are the headlines in the Laurel (Mississippi) Leader-Call blaring about the tug-of-war in Washington over decontrol of oil prices. President Ford's position is that oil prices need to go up so that we'll use less oil and eventually become energetically independent from imported oil. This seems suspect to my grandmother. Why, just the other day she heard him and Mr. Kissinger on the TV jawboning at the Arabs about how bad it would be for the world economy if they were to raise their prices this fall...
...They are like Hope and Crosby, like Laurel and Hardy. They have just the right chemistry," says Director Mark Rydell of his current stars, James Caan and Elliott Gould. On location in Mansfield, Ohio, for the filming of a comedy titled Harry and Walter Go to New York, the pair portray 1890s vaudevillians who end up in prison with an urbane safecracker, played by Michael Caine. Caan and Gould get wind of Caine's plot to break out of jail and into a bank, and before long they are racing him to the vault. To the actual habitues...
...Oscar (Nicholson), the short goofy one, marries her instead to make the theft legal, and they smuggle her off to California to wait for her 21st birthday. While they are busy making inept plans, the audience has time to notice what a fortune Nichols has already stolen: characterization from Laurel and Hardy, a plot unembellished from a basic list of Most Popular Themes, dialogue from the stock lines of period scripts, style and method from 20's and 30's vaudeville, and even a set which is unmistakably from The Day of the Locust. Stealing is fine if the director...
...takes second place. As in all vaudeville meant to enshrine two male stars, their relationship is what the show is really about; the plot serves as its stage, and they walk all over it. The characters of Oscar and Nicky have been pieced together with bits not only from Laurel and Hardy, the first two-man comedy act, but from all of their successors: Hope and Cresby, Abbott and Costello, Carney and Gleason, and Nichols's own broad way pair, the Odd Couple. All of these teams run on the same fuel--the big, ponderous straight-man who masterminds...
...this piece changes mood rapidly, sometimes striving toward the darker musical depths, sometimes, as in the second movement, content to rely on an engaging dance-like tune. While Kogan showed a sensitive ability to vary his tone and style in response to the shifting demands of the music, flutist Laurel Zucker tended toward shrill, unsupported bursts of sound in the high register in trying to create big dramatic events, and cellist Kevin Plunkett, with gruff attacks and a hard-edged tone seemed unwilling to respond to the lyricism of the writing...