Word: mock
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the moment it unveils its mock-hero, Rock Hunter (Tony Randall), ensconced side-screen as a one-man band in a spoof of the awe-struck music that always accompanies the searchlights introducing a Fox movie, Success is obviously in merry contempt of all that is sacred. The ensuing titles compete hopelessly with a series of TV commercials, totally irrelevant, but so distractingly zany that nobody will pay the least attention to the screen credits. Success roars onward, steadily more outrageous, shamelessly promoting forthcoming Fox movies (Peyton Place, Kiss Them for Me) and donating scads of free ad space...
...florid Victorian style by speaking from a stage while an uncle listened critically from the back of an empty auditorium. Moving on to the University of Saskatchewan, young Diefenbaker joined the ranks of the campus apprentice politicians who ran the debating society, heatedly argued national issues in a mock Parliament. He devoured political biographies (a special hero: Lincoln), won better-than-average marks and a forecast in the college magazine The Sheaf that he would some day lead the opposition in the House of Commons in Ottawa...
Despite the serious overtones, the play is above all comedy, which is what evidently escaped the Tufts' players. The cast was unfortunately headed by Fred Blais, who, miscast as Knock, turned in a dismal performance. While maintaining the Doctor's mock-solemnity, he not only failed to imbue him with the necessary dynamism and authority, but utterly lacked Knock's resourcefulness, wit, and ability to manipulate people. His awkward use of medical instruments, moreover, was not calculated to convince the audience that he was more than a bungler, which Knock most emphatically...
Total Security. The mock-hero of Author Ernst Pawel's From the Dark Tower unintentionally reminds the reader that Jonahs as well as Ahabs go looking for their private whales. Abe Rogoff is a middle-aged Jonah just asking to be swallowed. For ten years he has been a snickering outsider ("to take business seriously is a kind of disease") camouflaged as a docile insider in the pseudo-Gothic spires of Manhattan's Tower Mutual Life Insurance Co. Abe's disease might be diagnosed as undulant barricade fever, the nostalgic complaint of an ex-free-lover...
...that is all. James Reiger's piece on the fall of the Civitas (of Troy or of God?) may be intended as humorous, but the subject does not strike one as very funny. Whatever Reiger's attitude, his irony collapses in confusion with the mock melodrama of "O tell it not in Askelon,/Let not the daughters of Gath rejoice!" Reiger himself seems undecided whether to take his subject seriously...