Word: lubitsch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Brooks film not a Mel Brooks film? When he produces but does not direct, when he stars but does not write. And perhaps when he is more interested in paying tribute than in parody. To Be or Not to Be is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy about a troupe of ungood actors asked to take parts in a real-life espionage plot set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Lubitsch was contrasting the egocentricity and generosity of show people with the boorishness of their oppressors, representatives of a politics that monstrously parodied their values...
...situations of the original serve Adapters Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham well, and if Director Alan Johnson is no Lubitsch, he could well reply, "Who is?" Brooks and Anne Bancroft play the old Jack Benny and Carole Lombard roles with harder edges and softer centers than their predecessors did-a criticism that could be applied to the entire enterprise. Yet the basic story remains surprisingly sturdy and entertaining in the retelling...
...Weimar set among palm trees. In Strangers in Paradise, John Russell Taylor, film critic of the Times of London, tells ironic tales out of court about the Hollywood settlers. Actors like Conrad Veidt and Otto Preminger, fleeing from Hitler, were hired to impersonate Nazis in war movies. Ernst Lubitsch, eager to propagandize against the Third Reich, directed a delicate, tentative farce, To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny as a Polish ham actor. In the film a German general appraises Benny: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." For his efforts, Lubitsch was pilloried...
This is a touch of Mel Brooks rather than Ernst Lubitsch, though elsewhere Korda exhibits a considerable talent for imitating the sophisticated innuendoes of that German-born film maker. Worldly Goods is, in fact, a trove of mimicked styles. Beyond its undeniable entertainment qualities, the book can be read as a clinic on what publishers call a page-turner. The author-editor goes one step further and ensures subliminal product identification, with his name centered at the top of every other page...
...Even in Hollywood, structure is now a word you are apt to hear only from Bel Air real estate agents. Adventurous directors snapped the straight spine of traditional drama into a series of vertebral vignettes. The standard comedy structure, which had kept stage and screen humming from Labiche to Lubitsch, gave way to anthologies of slapstick punctuated by expletives. The story became so much dead air between explosions of pain and laughter. And so the question arises: Does anyone in movies still care about structure...