Word: mad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Black Picture Show, Playwright Bill Gunn's hero is already hospitalized, or rather, confined to a Bronx, New York City, mental home. Alexander (Dick Anthony Williams) has gone mad, but he has been a black poet, playwright and screenwriter of merit. Fragmented episodes indicate how he has bobbed for the white man's Golden Delicious apple and drowned in economic and psychic abasement. He is dying; perhaps he is already dead. Obfuscation ranks high among Playwright Gunn's defects...
Gene Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays the wild-eyed, wild-haired grandson of the Baron von Frankenstein in a brilliant, highly personal take-off on the familiar character of the mad genius. He begins the movie as an American neurosurgeon frantically embarrassed by his ancestor's antiscientific shenanigans. Forced to journey to Transylvania to receive the Baron's will, he discovers the ancient laboratory and is seduced by his grandfather's dreams--providing the set-up for a spoof of every major scene in the original film, interrupted by the tangents of Brooks's imagination and concluded...
...Uncle Fester. He delivers one-liners like Groucho. Cloris Leachman, who does a terrific job of frowning and mugging through an unrewarding part, may have pilfered from Dame Judith Anderson's role in Rebecca as the forbidding keeper of the Baron's castle. Young Frankenstein stalks about with the mad intensity and even the cap and cloak of Sherlock Holmes (whose film image dates from the 1930s). "Chattanooga Choo-choo," a popular song of the '30s, resurfaces when Wilder leans out of the train window on arrival and asks, "Is this Transylvania Station?" and is answered by other lines from...
...outcome of Sunday's game' will depend largely on how successfully Pittsburgh can contain Tarkenton. When the Vikings' wily quarterback starts leading pass rushers on a mad chase around the backfield, pass coverage often breaks down. Moreover, if Tarkenton can scramble enough to tire the Steelers' pass rushers, they could become vulnerable to the run. Minnesota also has the advantage of experience; this is their second consecutive Super Bowl and the third in the past six years. They are hungry for their first...
...only thing Equus lacks is a sense of what it is like to be mad. Firth shows us energetically enough what it looks like to be mad, but Shaffer doesn't give him a chance to tell what he feels. The boy's passion may be more intense than anything Dysart has ever known, but such a passion, attractive from the outside, may be a burden to those who have to live with it, a source of more pain than exaltation. Maybe there are some kinds of creativity that are not self-destructive and cruel. Shaffer's play, with...