Word: mimics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kaye, who is mimic, comic, dancer and singer, seems to have too many talents to play just one part per movie (other films in which he had multiple identities: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Wonder Man). In Riviera, he is a delight in all his roles. As the French ladykiller, he plays straight with just the right elegant swagger. As the American, he clowns and clogs through impersonations of Maurice Chevalier, Carmen Miranda, a kilted Scot, a puppet, a Spanish dancer and, of course, the fashionable Frenchman...
Kaye is indebted to his writers, Sylvia Fine and Max Liebman, for some fine material. His script makes full use of his abilities as a singer and a mimic. An excellent example of this is a scene in a movie lobby, in which Kaye careens down stairs, parodies dance steps and movie plots, while screaming lines like this screen credit list...
...Pseudo-intellectuals," says Levine bitingly, "who feel that they have identified themselves with Oxonians when they include eyether [in] their otherwise humdrum speech pattern are generally among those who condescendingly mimic these allegedly Brooklyn cockneyisms. How horrified they would be to learn that in England itself, their adopted home, educated speakers are guilty of the same barbarisms." Swallering is quite common among Britons, and even the best people refer to the Indiar Office. But, says Brooklyn's Levine, "it is not considered bad form in England...
Your Jan. 22 appraisal of Sinclair Lewis as "not a great writer, nor even a very good one" may be confirmed by posterity, but it still seems to me that the author of Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith was something more than a mere clever mimic and pamphleteer...
Gloria Swanson, in a role which, at first blush, seems to hew ticklishly close to her own lifeline, gets a chance to mimic a parasol-twirling Mack Sennett bathing beauty, to impersonate Charlie Chaplin (as she did in 1924's Manhandled) and to burst into dazzling emotional pyrotechnics. It is as juicy a part as any actress could hope for, and Actress Swanson squeezes the last drop from...