Word: manic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Behind that painted grin and black button nose was Paul McCartney. Together with his wife Linda, 33, and their three children, Paul, 32, was enjoying Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Thoroughly disguised as a manic clown, he cavorted down St. Charles Avenue and watched the Rex parade. The McCartneys have been secluded in New Orleans since mid-January, and this was their coming-out party. Paul is also making a record album, using local jazz musicians. Linda plays along on the organ. Paul was so impressed by the festivities that he wrote a new song, My Carnival, for his album...
...balding Cleveland garbage-disposal contractor, on the lam from his wife's mobster brother, takes refuge among the Ritz's imps of the perverse. What follows is a bedlam of straight-gay confrontations. Robert Drivas directs with manic speed and lashings of hysteria, perhaps recognizing that if this show stops for a minute, it may never start up again. In The Ritz, McNally abandons the idiosyncratic comic vision he brought to Bad Habits (TIME, Feb. 18, 1974) in favor of old vaudeville and burlesque routines. Still, there are plenty of laughs left in those, whichever way you Swing...
...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 by a resounding coda. Wilder alternates moments of deadpan lucidity with the sudden spasms of pure manic fury that characterize the egotist/neurotic. He turns ordinary comic ineptitude into a thoroughly debilitating frenzy that intensifies as the dire experiment proceeds; the riotous heights of the film...
Murray Schisgal commands the last manic outpost of the theater of the absurd. He can be terribly funny-provided his audience possesses sympathy with the dipsy doodlers of this world...
...needle scratches as the cast belts them out. As the aging astronomy prof, and the geriatric football coach, Alice Faye and Gene Nelson attempt to hoof and puff and blow the house down; they only succeed in underlining the show's decrepitude. Nor can Michael Kidd's manic drill-sergeant direction hide the melancholy truth that because a thing is old does not mean it is an antique; junk is junk...