Word: lisp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American extras running about trying to look Italian by wildly gesticulating and screaming 'Brava, Brava.' Bertolucci also drags out an antiquated collection of cliches about opera and its fans. His women parade about a la Gertrude Stein and partake of lesbian love with decadent Italian countesses. His men lisp on about 'darlin' Caterina and swish about backstage. It would be funny if it weren't so offensive...
...urban streetside inflection breaks up the house, deliberately. Pacino has insufficient breath control to carry a Shakespearean line, so he spits out the poetry and mars the imagery. He strikes just two vocal chords: one, the brawling ranter, the other the insinuative little-boy whiner. Furthermore, he tends to lisp. Toward the end of the play, when Richard's fortunes are abysmally low, he asks one of his few loyal allies: "Will our friends pwoove all twoo...
...democratic values and lower-class common sense on Middle European court politics at the turn of the century. Sellers must save his best comic efforts for the prince's role. He makes him into a perfect twit, a gambling, womanizing, cowardly wastrel, complete with an absolutely splendid lisp that is as loonily effective as Inspector Clouseau's fractured French...
Director Moore tries to disguise the laziness of Simon's effort with a quick step pace, but Peter Falk, although he does a good imitation of Bogart's snarly lisp, tends to give the game away by resting on that modest achievement. Few of the other "all-stars" do much more than trace a broad Crayola line around fa miliar types. The Cheap Detective offers a few snorts of recognition and a basically good-natured air. But frankly, they did this sort of thing just as well, and a lot more quickly, on the Carol Burnett Show...
...culture, taking an unblinking gaze at the foibles and hangups of its members. But this is no Boys in the Band apologia for homosexuals. The film does not fish for either compliments or pity from its viewers; Turner and his fellow female impersonators may all limp their wrists and lisp their words, but they are all endearing people struggling to make it in a very trying business long on frustration and short on bucks...