Word: mostellers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...building they talk about the TV shows of the night before, since they all watch TV and usually choose the same shows. Harry's visit to a childhood sweetheart grown senile (Geraldine Page) is one of the few episodes in which the film touches base with reality. Joshua Mostel, as one of Harry's grandchildren, plays the role of a deadpan mixed-up kid who takes a vow of silence with icy, despicable correctness. And Art Carney, though not as funny as he was in The Honeymooners, salvages some dignity for the film even when it seems most intent...
When Marjorie Barkentin's dramatization of Nighttown first opened in New York in 1958, there were critical reservations, for all Zero Mostel's brilliance in the role of Bloom. Now Mostel is back in Nighttown, which opened last week on Broadway. There are still plenty of reservations...
Fordham Freshman. Mostel shambles and capers and preens through Bloom's transformations-a Circe's hog, transvestite, martyr, hero of the people-with an air of dignified amazement. However, this is a muted Mostel, and somehow he is not enough. Whether the problem lies in trying to capture Joyce onstage or in Burgess Meredith's direction, there are long moments of curious lifelessness, a kind of listless anarchy, the stage business often as flyaway as the Joycean allusions...
...Horgan hangs a portrait of Nixon over Mostel's bed, and cuts away to it throughout Mostel's transformation. This isn't funny. It's just another gimmick to make the theme of political conformity seem more relevant to us. We're not such thick-skinned rhinos that we need such pointed, heavy-handed reminders...
Wilder is a properly meek and appropriately gentle Stanley. Like Mostel, he makes the most of his watered-down part. His big scene, the final assertion of his humanity, is blighted by the same gimmickry that plagues Mostel's transformation scene. Having acknowledged that he can never become a rhinoceros, Wilder climbs to the top of a tall building and looks out over the town of animals. O'Horgan's camera frames him against a blue sky, he lights a cigarette, music surges up in the background. What is meant to be a moving assertion of man's dignity ends...