Word: mostel
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...PRODUCERS. Writer-Comedian Mel Brooks's first film is an uneven joy ride with two canny Broadway showmen (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who set out to make a fortune by staging a flop...
...PRODUCERS. Writer-Comedian Mel Brooks's first film is a wildly funny joy ride with two canny Broadway showmen (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who set out to make a fortune by staging a flop...
...PRODUCERS. Two shyster impresarios (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) set out to make a killing on Broadway in this first film by Comedian-Writer Mel Brooks, which offers, albeit fitfully, some of the best cinema comedy in years...
...hero, John Morley (Zero Mostel) is, by self-definition, "a flaming faggot." He is also a zany, successful author who has never paid his income tax. The I.R.S. has ferreted out his secret, and Morley has been forced to throw himself on the mercy of tax advisers. His chief consultant, Irving Spaatz (Jules Munshin), is a legal weasel of wizardry inventiveness. Munshin plays the role in droll fashion and is astonishingly agile at working his way through a verbal tax maze of inflated gibberish that includes explanations of convertible debentures, spinoffs, and sale-leaseback arrangements...
...with his eyes, which roll in a fine frenzy as his latest financial coups are related to him by the omnipresent Spaatz. The time inevitably comes to get divorced for tax purposes, and then Morley kills himself-for tax purposes. In a final scene of immense sadness and gravity, Mostel performs the rite of hara-kiri with a pair of garden shears. As Japanese music plays offstage, he achieves a remarkable blend of Oriental serenity and intensity, altogether his most memorable theatrical feat since he turned into a rhinoceros in Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros...